In every workflow we build, your team approves anything a customer sees or anything that moves money until it decides a step can run on its own. Approvals arrive by email with the full draft and two buttons, so nobody needs a new login or portal, and every decision is logged.
This guide explains what waits for approval, how the email works, what we log and what happens when a draft is wrong.
What waits for a person
Three kinds of steps wait for a person when a workflow first goes live:
- Anything a customer sees, such as an email, a letter, an update or a reply.
- Anything that moves money, such as an invoice, a credit or a payment reminder with a new amount.
- Anything that changes an important record, such as a lease, a matter, a contract or a deal stage.
Steps that stay inside your team, like reading a document, drafting a note or sorting a request, run without a click, since nothing leaves the team until a person signs off.
Once approvals feel predictable, your team can let routine steps run without a click, one step at a time. The decision stays with you, and you can take it back.
How the approval email works
Each item that needs a decision arrives as its own email in the inbox of the person who approves it:
- The full content, exactly as the customer would see it, with nothing to open elsewhere.
- Two buttons, one to approve and one to send it back.
Any approver on the list can decide from the inbox, on a phone or a laptop.
Email is our default because every team already has it. If your team works in Slack or Microsoft Teams, approvals can arrive there, set up for your workflow.
A real example
An agency was losing track of client approvals for every draft in long email threads, and it was hard to see what was approved and what was still waiting.
We built a workflow that emails each draft to the client with its full content and two buttons, so any approver at the client can decide from the inbox. A shared content calendar keeps the drafts, comments and history in one place, and a morning note flags anything running late. It is live and in daily use.
What we log
Every action in every workflow we build goes into an action log:
- what the workflow drafted, read or changed;
- who approved it or sent it back, and when;
- what went out, to whom and through which tool.
Each month you get a report of what ran and what your team approved. There is no portal to log into; the log and the report come to you.
What happens when a draft is wrong
Your approver sends it back, and nothing goes out. That is the point of starting with approvals: a wrong draft costs one click and stays inside your team.
We check every workflow weekly, and when the same correction keeps coming back, we fix the workflow so the draft comes out right next time. When a platform or a rule changes, we update the workflow before it drifts.
Where approval sits in your industry
The approver is whoever would sign off on that work today:
- Property management: an owner update waits for the property manager, who checks every figure against the statement. AI stays out of tenant screening and ad targeting, which the Fair Housing Act governs.
- Law firms: a client letter or a conflict check waits for the attorney. Whether client information may go into an AI workflow at all is the firm’s decision under ABA Formal Opinion 512, and it often needs the client’s informed consent. We build each workflow to fit what the firm decides.
- Home services: a reminder text or a call list waits for the office manager, and calls and texts go only to customers who agreed to receive them, as the TCPA requires.
- Professional services: a client report or a renewal offer waits for the account lead.
Questions people ask
Do we need to install anything?No. Approvals arrive by email, and everything we build runs inside the software your team already pays for.
Can more than one person approve?Yes. You choose who approves each kind of step, and any of them can decide.
Can we change what needs approval later?Yes, step by step. Your team decides when a step can run on its own, and can put it back under approval at any time.
Is our data used to train AI models?No. Each workflow gets only the access it needs, and your data stays out of model training.