Approvals

Applies to: anota, paid plans (Bronze and above) Roles required: Editor or above to set up approvals and to resend or withdraw a request; Viewer or above to see them in the inbox. Approvers need no anota account. Regulatory references: none

Overview

Some responses need a yes or no from a person before anyone acts on them: a time-off request, a purchase, an expense claim. With approvals, anota emails the people you name a link to review each response. The first of them to decide settles it, the person who sent the response is told the result, and you see the state in the Submissions inbox.

The examples use Café Aurora's Time Off Request: a barista asks for days off, and the shop's manager or its owner approves or rejects the request.

Key concepts

• Approval: a request for someone to approve or reject one response. It starts when the response arrives (for a form that takes payments, once the payment succeeds).
• Approver: anyone whose email you list. They don't need an anota account: they decide from a link in the email.
• One decision is enough: every approver you list gets a link, and the first one to decide settles the response. The others then see that it was already decided.
• Review link: valid for 14 days, and it lets the approver decide once. It opens a page that shows the answers and the Approve and Reject buttons. Opening the link never decides anything by itself.
• Approval state: Pending, Approved or Rejected, shown next to the response's inbox status (New, Read, Flagged, Spam). A response can be Flagged and Approved at once.
• Plans: approvals are part of every paid plan (Bronze and above). On the free Starter plan the section shows an upgrade message.

Task 1 — Turn on approvals for a form

Prerequisites

• A role of Editor or above.
• A paid plan (Bronze or above).
• A published form. The Publish tab shows its sections only once the form has been published (see Publish and share).

Step-by-step

1. Open the form in the builder, click the Publish tab, then Approvals ("Who approves each response") on the left.

   Approvals sit next to Notifications, because both are about who gets emailed.

2. Tick Ask for approval on every response.

   Until you tick it, responses arrive as they always did.

3. Under Approvers (one email per line, up to 10), type one address per line. In Note for approvers (optional) you can add a sentence they will see above the answers, up to 500 characters.

   Every address you list receives a link. Duplicates and extra spaces are cleaned up for you.

4. Click Save changes. Saved appears next to the button.

   Approvals take effect for the next response; you don't need to click Update.

Result

From now on each new response to this form starts an approval. The people you list get an email, and you still get the usual notification as before.

If a message appears instead, it says what to fix: Add at least one approver before turning approvals on, Check this email address: followed by the address that isn't valid, or Up to 10 approvers per form.

Task 2 — Decide as an approver

This task is what each approver does. They can be people outside your team: no account or sign-in is needed.

Step-by-step

5. The approver receives an email titled A response is waiting for your decision. It names the form, says until when the link works, shows your note, and lists the answers. They click Review and decide.

   The email is written in the form's base language.

6. The link opens a page with the answers and a Comment box. The page follows the approver's browser language.

   Opening the link doesn't decide anything. Only the buttons do.

7. The approver clicks Approve, or Reject. A comment is optional to approve and required to reject, up to 1,000 characters.

   A rejection without a comment shows Write a comment to reject. and nothing is saved.

8. A confirmation appears: Approved, thank you or Rejected, thank you.

   The decision is final: the link can't be used again.

Result

The response is Approved or Rejected. Any other approver who opens their link sees This response was already decided, and nothing else changes.

Task 3 — Follow your requests in the inbox

Step-by-step

9. Open the form's Submissions. The table has an Approval column with a Pending, Approved or Rejected badge. When at least one request is waiting, a Pending approval tab shows how many. Click it to see only those.

   Responses that never asked for approval show nothing in that column.

10. Click a pending response to see who was asked. As an Editor or above you can Resend request, which emails a fresh link to every approver and cancels the earlier links, or Withdraw request, which cancels the request. Resend it when an email got lost or the links ran out: the detail then says The links expired. Resend the request.

    You can't decide for an approver here. A decision always comes from an approver's own link.

11. Click a decided response to see who decided, when, and their comment.

    Only the approver who decided is shown with a decision; the others stay without one.

Result

You can tell at a glance what is waiting, what was decided and by whom.

Task 4 — What the person who asked receives

Step-by-step

12. As soon as an approver decides, the person who submitted the response gets an email: Your request was approved or Your request was rejected, with the approver's comment if there is one. It goes to the address in the form's first Email question, in the language they filled the form in.

    If the form has no Email question, nobody is emailed. The decision is still in the inbox.

Result

The person knows the outcome without having to ask.

Payments and approvals

On a form that takes payments with Stripe, the approval request goes out only after the payment succeeds, so approvers never review an unpaid order.

If your plan changes

If you move to the free Starter plan, requests already sent keep working and decided ones stay readable. New responses stop asking for approval, and the Approvals section shows an upgrade message. You can still switch approvals off.

Approvals from Claude, the API and webhooks

• Claude and other assistants (MCP): list_submissions takes an approval filter (pending, approved or rejected) and shows each response's approval. get_submission shows the approvers, their decisions and comments. resend_approval_request resends a pending request. No tool can approve or reject: only an approver can decide, from their own link. See Connect Claude and ChatGPT (MCP).
• REST API: the same list filter, and POST /api/v1/submissions/{submissionId}/approval/resend. See Developers and API.
• Webhooks: webhooks created with includeApprovalEvents also receive submission.approved and submission.rejected, with the approver's decision and comment. Existing webhooks keep receiving submission.created only.

Field reference

Roles and permissions

Troubleshooting

Related features

• Submissions inbox
• Email notifications
• Publish and share
• Multilingual forms
• Connect Claude and ChatGPT (MCP)
• Developers and API
• Roles and permissions