Using Locks to Allow or Restrict Access to Approvals 

In a manual approval workflow, you can use locks to allow or restrict access to approvals. This workflow is only used where your organisation has manual approvals turned on – you can ask us if you would like this functionality to be turned on for your company. 

Whilst a regular approval workflow automatically progresses as people review and approve work, manual approvals allow employees to grant or restrict access to an approval level as required.

When manual approval functionality is turned on, users have to wait until a deadline is reached before moving on to the next level of approval. Where there are no deadlines, manually allowing or restricting access to approvals can be a good tool to use instead of waiting for people to approve. This access is achieved by using our lock functionality. 

Allowing or Restricting Access to a Single Approval

To allow or restrict access to an approval, head to the Projects list and click on the project of interest. Scroll down to the Approvals section and click the Blue Arrow button. 

Click the i icon   next to the approval you'd like to edit.

From the resulting screen, you can toggle between the locked icon  to restrict approval access and unlocked icon  to allow approval access to a given approval level. When you unlock a level, affected users receive an email notification to let them know that there's something for them to review in admation.

When you lock a level, a user's Accept and Reject buttons will be greyed out on their approval screen. 

Any name found under an approval level heading will be affected by your changes, as per the screenshot below.

Allowing or Restricting Access to Multiple Approvals in Bulk

You can also allow or restrict access to multiple approvals in bulk. To do this, head to the Approvals menu and click on the Sent tab. This page shows you a list of all work that you have sent for to other people for approval.

You can use your Filters to show the work you are after and narrow down your search results. Then click Search to update your page. 

Then select the items you'd like to allow or restrict access to by using the checkboxes so that they turn blue . Then click the lock icon to restrict access to the approval, or the unlock icon  to allow access to the approval. 

From this same menu, you can also: 

• Send the items off as a message attachment
• Mark approval requests as read
• Bulk Forward approvals to other people
• Bulk download feedback reports for each item
• Bulk download the artwork for the selected files

You may also opt to click on the locks individually from this page. Again, locks are managed per level, so if you have multiple approval levels, you may see multiple locks to toggle between for a given project.