Product Area: Approvals

 Impact of Change: New Functionalities

 Roles Impacted: Admins, Approvers

Details

We’re excited to launch of our new approvals system, designed to streamline and improve your contract workflows. This update brings greater flexibility, control, and efficiency to how approvals are managed. Below, we outline what’s new and what are the other changes for you in the new approvals system.

What's New in the Approvals System:

• Automatic Recollection of Approvals: Now, when changes are made to a contract—like uploading a new version or making edits in the document—the system automatically recollects approvals. This ensures that any updates are fully reviewed without needing manual follow-ups, perfect for contracts going through multiple revisions.
• Redlining Approvals: When template-generated contracts are edited (redlined), they lose their pre-approved legal structure. This situation might require additional approvals, ensuring that any unapproved changes are caught. Redlining Approvals are ideal for making sure no crucial modifications are overlooked when a template contract is altered.
• Granular Approval Control : You can now control who can skip approvals and block actions like sending or downloading a contract while approvals are in progress. Unlike before, these restrictions can be set at an individual approval level, offering more precision and security in managing the approval process.
• Ad-Hoc Approvals at Any Stage: Previously, ad-hoc approvals were only possible after all ongoing approvals were completed. Now, you can add ad-hoc approvals at any point in the negotiation process, providing more flexibility to incorporate additional input when needed.
• Pausing Approvals Collection: You can now pause the approval process to wait for external actions, such as counterparty reviews. This ensures that internal approvals don’t move forward prematurely, giving you more control over the contracting process.

Other changes:

• Contracts in Progress vs. New Contracts : Contracts that are currently in progress will not be affected by the migration to the new approvals system. Only contracts created after the workflow is migrated will use the new approvals process, ensuring ongoing contracts remain stable while new ones benefit from the enhanced features.
• Changes to Approval Preferences : Previously, changes to approval preferences were applied retrospectively to all existing contracts, which was the only setting in the workflow manager with this behavior. Now, approval preferences will apply only to new contracts, making the behavior consistent with other workflow settings.
• Approval Preferences on Ad-hoc Approvals : Previously, approval preferences were applied uniformly across all approvals, including ad-hoc ones. In the new system, these preferences are set at the approval level in the workflow manager. Since ad-hoc approvals are not at the workflow level therefore the approval preferences are not applicable to them, so it can be skipped, & the contract can be downloaded, or sent to the counterparty while in progress. We plan to reintroduce preferences for ad-hoc approvals in future updates.
• Uploading an Executed Version of the Contract : Previously, if a user couldn’t mark a contract for execution while approvals were pending, they also couldn’t upload the executed version. With the new approvals system, users can upload the executed version anytime, and pending approvals will be skipped, with notifications sent to approvers.
• Merging of Approval Lists : Pre-send and pre-sign approvals, as well as entity-specific approvals, will now be merged into a single list. Entity-specific approvals will be converted into conditional approvals based on entity variables, maintaining consistent approval behavior while simplifying the setup.
• Approvals in Upload-Sign Workflow:Previously only pre-sign approvals set in the TPP workflow would be collected for upload-sign contracts. Now all approvals in the TPP workflow will also apply to upload-sign contracts, ensuring that no approvals are missed during any part of the process.
• Collect Approvals Modal: The previous form of the modal used for adding notes and requesting approvals has been removed but will reintroduced with improvements later.

Deprecation of Certain Features

• Suggesting Changes: The option to suggest changes to approvals has been merged with the reject action to simplify the process.
• Bulk Skipping: The ability to skip approvals in bulk is being deprecated to ensure each approval is given individual attention.
• Blocking Version Uploads: The feature that blocked version uploads during approvals has been deprecated. Now, users can configure approvals to reset when a new version is uploaded, making the need for blocking unnecessary.
• Blocking Mark for Execution: Explicitly blocking 'Mark for execution' action is now deprecated. In the new approvals system, this action will remain disabled by default until all required approvals are collected, ensuring full compliance before execution.

How to Enable: We will be rolling out this feature to all customers over the coming weeks. If you would like to have it enabled sooner, please contact your CSM.

Relevant Resources: Help Center Documentation