When it comes to managing documents, there’s a fine line between having a perfectly functioning document approval process workflow and losing your mind to constant inefficiencies.
In project management, the approval workflow can often be a hit-or-miss undertaking.
It’s a crucial element for streamlining your operations and keeping order in your work processes, but not all of us have managed to nail it just yet.
In this article, we’ll outline a five-step strategy for improving your document approval workflow, why it’s important, and how you can use PandaDoc’s automated software to streamline the approval process.
Let’s dive right in!
Document approval workflows are a set of rules for collaborating, reviewing, approving, submitting, and tracking documents.
They are often used to review large contracts, major purchases, HR policies, and other official communications between parties involved in a project or transaction, such as expense reports, sales proposals, employment agreements, etc.
For example, here’s how the document approval workflow of an employment agreement might look:
Now, this process of approval looks fairly simple.
But what if we take a contract involving three companies? And what if they each have their own legal departments?
How do you keep track of all the minutiae that are involved with getting all parties on the same page?
The reality is that processes can be extremely complex or fairly simple, depending on your organization’s needs and goals. That’s where document approval workflows come into play.
To understand why document approval workflows are so important for your business, let’s take a look at their main benefits.
Tasks like contract review can be extremely time-consuming for companies when performed manually.
Using an automated workflow, documents can be routed for approval, signed, and reviewed by multiple parties, and returned to their originator faster than ever before.
A clear path defined for each document means that there are fewer chances for misunderstandings or mistakes to slip past.
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An approval workflow makes it easier for employees at all levels in an organization to submit documents, papers, or requests that have been reviewed by others before they are submitted for final approval.
The result is that time is saved at every level, which in turn creates increased efficiency throughout the organization.
There’s always a clear and transparent record of who has seen a document, who has approved it, who is responsible, and when it’s been submitted.
This means that you’ll never have any issues related to late submissions or incomplete work.
The first step to crafting the perfect document review and approval process is to pick a document management system that supports your workflow.
A document management system is a way to store and manage files electronically.
A well-designed system will allow you to browse through documents, comment on them and assign tasks to different people.
It also enables you to set different permission levels for your files.
For example, you might want some of your team members to be able to read the contents of a file, but not change it.
A well-designed system will also provide a user-friendly interface that allows you and your team members to easily submit work for review, discuss it with others in the team, and track its progress.
For instance, PandaDoc’s cloud-based content management system keeps everyone involved in the process and up to date with real-time chat and comment moderation.
Simply put, don’t use the same approval process for internal documents as you do for client-facing documents:
When you use two different types of approval processes for internal and external documents, each displays its own approval cue—you can easily tell from the document name which process it needs to go through first.
Also, if your business uses two different approval processes, you can streamline internal checks by automatically assigning documents to teams or individual members.
PandaDoc’s advanced automation features let you automatically assign customers, projects, or even entire departments to specific employees or teams with custom rules.
Once you’ve figured out the different types of documents that need approval, it’s time to work out how they’ll flow through the approval process.
For example, will your sales rep initiate the document and pass it to accounts receivable or will a customer service representative approve it first?
This step is about defining the actual workflow lifecycle — how documents will move once they’re initiated.
PandaDoc’s workflow tool allows you to create customized approval steps.
You can set due dates, reorder approval steps by dragging and dropping, and configure email notifications from the dashboard.
Once you’ve set up your custom document review and approval process, you’ll be able to assign documents to approvers and keep track of every document submission in your Audit trail tab.
Now that you’ve laid out the workflow for your entire submission process, it’s time to assign responsibilities.
You can also scale up your documentation efforts for new markets without adding any additional headcount by using the role-based permissions that come with PandaDoc’s granular permissions feature.
This lets you onboard new partners and consultants outside your team who can access and comment on documents without having full access to all of your workspace.
Approve your first documents
Conditional rules allow you to route documents based on criteria that you set.
You can also use conditional rules to flag specific workflows for attention, make approvals automatic, and add a step to the process that triggers a notification.
If you’re using PandaDoc as your document approval system, for instance, you can set up a conditional rule that will automatically flag any expense reports over $10,000 and send them straight to your CFO without going through the rest of your company’s finance team first.
Here’s how this would look in the PandaDoc Editor:
Another way to save time in your document approval process is to add reviews at various stages.
You can either do this manually by regularly going over your content, or you can automate this part, too.
The process for this is as follows:
The most critical thing to take into consideration when deciding on the stages in a review process is visibility.
Visibility means taking a holistic view and considering more than just the project at hand when thinking about the information you require.
When considering multiple projects, you should determine the following:
Visibility into these areas can help you to formulate more intelligent review stages.
Often, you’ll be including external stakeholders in your document approval process.
In order to ensure this goes smoothly, it’s worth establishing the following guidelines:
These questions will help you to establish a process for external evaluation, as well as allowing you to gain clarity on your internal deadlines and processes.
Delays can be a big issue when you have multiple review stages and both internal and external reviewers.
Whether you’re waiting for teammates to provide specific information, or waiting for stakeholders to respond to you, using reminder systems can help you with time management.
Automated notifications can be great here—and not just about the overall project.
Each stage should have its own deadline to be completed by, in order to keep everything on track.
Many companies choose to create automated workflow templates in order to apply a standardized set of information and decision steps across several different projects.
Usually, the more you can standardize your processes with templates, the better it will be for your efficiency.
A handful of templates will probably be enough to automate a multi-step approval process.
This will help you to avoid mistakes and duplications, and allow your team to breeze through the approval workflow process at a faster rate.
A document approval process for a piece of written content could look like:
An employee contract approval workflow could look like this:
In the end, a well-thought-out document review and approval process can do wonders for your organization. It can save you time and money by leaving little room for miscommunication and mistakes.
If you make sure to effectively plan, develop, and implement an automated approval workflow that’s also efficient, you’ll be amazed at how much faster your documents move through the system.
Contact PandaDoc today, and see how our solutions can help you start easily achieving these goals!
PandDoc is not a law firm, or a substitute for an attorney or law firm. This page is not intended to and does not provide legal advice. Should you have legal questions on the validity of e-signatures or digital signatures and the enforceability thereof, please consult with an attorney or law firm. Use of PandaDocs services are governed by our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Originally published March 15, 2022, updated March 17, 2023
Yauhen Zaremba Director of Demand Generation at PandaDoc
Yauhen is the Director of Demand Generation at PandaDoc. He’s been a marketer for 10+ years, and for the last five years, he’s been entirely focused on the electronic signature, proposal, and document management markets. Yauhen has experience speaking at niche conferences where he enjoys sharing his expertise with other curious marketers. And in his spare time, he is an avid fisherman and takes nearly 20 fishing trips every year.
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