How to use Multi Step Approval Process

Everything on this page takes about three minutes.

Before you start

• A monday.com account, and permission to install apps on it.
• A board with at least one item.
• The people who will approve must be users in the same monday.com account.

1. Install and open the view

1. Install the app from the monday.com marketplace.
2. Open a board, click the + next to the view tabs at the top, and add the Approvals view.
3. Open any item. The view shows the approval requests for that item.

2. Connect the app to monday.com — do this once

The first time you open the view you will see a band saying "This account is not connected to monday.com yet", with a Connect to monday button.

Click it. A monday.com consent screen opens in a new tab, listing what the app is allowed to do. Approve it and the tab closes with a "Done" message.

Until you do this the app still works, but nobody is told: no notifications, no update written on the item, and approvers appear as numbers instead of names. It only has to be done once per account, by one person.

3. Create an approval request

1. Click New request.
2. Search for each approver by name and click them. They appear as chips, in the order you picked them.
3. Choose the mode:
   • All at once — everyone is asked right away, in no particular order.
   • One at a time — in the order you picked. The next approver is only asked once the previous one has approved. In this mode the chips are numbered, so the order is visible before you commit.
4. Click Create request.

4. Approve or reject

Each approver gets a monday.com notification with the item's name and a link. Opening the item and the Approvals view shows Approve and Reject buttons — but only to the people whose turn it is. Everyone else sees the current state and who is holding it up.

When the request closes, the app writes an update on the item, for example "Everyone approved “Invoice #204” — 3/3 approvals."

5. Reading the card

A single rejection closes the whole request: nobody after that is asked.

Showing the result on the board

The approval lives inside this view, but you can have it mirrored into a status column so the board shows it from a distance. Pick the column under the title: Show the result in this board column. The app then writes Pending approval, Approved or Rejected into it, and creates those labels if the column does not have them yet.

Three things worth knowing before you turn it on.

• Nothing is written until you pick a column. The app does not touch your board on its own.
• Creating the labels needs permission to change the board structure. If your account does not have it, the column stays where it is and the app tells you why, right under the picker.
• The column is a mirror, not the record. Anyone who can edit the board can change that cell by hand, and the app cannot stop them. The record that counts stays here, where every decision has a name and a time next to it.

Cancelling a request empties the cell again: the app wrote it, the app clears it.

If something looks wrong

Approvers show as numbers instead of names

The account is not connected yet. Go back to step 2.

Nobody received a notification

Same cause. Without the connection the app cannot write into monday.com, so notifications are skipped rather than failing loudly.

The view looks out of date

Reload the page with Ctrl+Shift+R (Cmd+Shift+R on a Mac). Browsers cache the app's files aggressively.

The first request of the day is slow

The app's server sleeps when it is idle and takes a moment to wake up. It only affects the first request after a long pause.

Still stuck?

Write to [email protected] and say which board and item you were on. Replies usually arrive within one working day.