If you have already decided to build this natively and just want somebody else to have made the structural decisions, here they are. Five columns, seven labels, four automations. Ten minutes.
Columns
Every column you add is one more thing to keep true.
The one column that says where the work is. Labels below.
Who is responsible for the work — not who approves it.
Set by an automation whenever the status changes. Without it you cannot see what has been sitting somewhere too long, which is the only operational question that matters.
Only if things go back and forth — creative work, drawings, contracts. Saves a status per round.
What is being approved. Name files with a revision and never overwrite one.
Labels
Describing where the work is, not who has it.
Nothing has been asked of anybody yet.
One label per approving group, in the order they are asked.
Same. Add or remove these to match your stages.
Same again.
The one everybody forgets. Not a softer word for rejected.
Finished and agreed.
Finished and refused. Rare, and it should be.
Add and remove the With … labels to match your own stages. Everything else stays the same whatever you are approving.
Automations
Board → Automate → Add automation, then find each of these.
One per stage. Use the specific label, never plain “status changes”.
The only automation that may use plain “status changes”, because it is the one thing that genuinely should fire on every movement.
Sends it back to whoever asked, rather than back to the start.
Set on Stage entered plus three days. This is the automation that stops things disappearing.
The mistake this template avoids
Except for the date, where it is the correct trigger.
Plain when status changes fires on every movement of that column, including the one your own approval makes when it finishes. Build a notification on it and approving something sends a fresh approval request about the thing just approved — forever, until somebody notices the loop.
Name the label. When status changes to With legal fires once, when it should, and stops.
Questions
Two or three. Every stage adds a person who can be on holiday, and the cost of a fourth is usually a week. If a stage exists because somebody wants to be informed rather than because they can say no, make it a notification instead of a stage.
The label, for the stage — and a People column only if you need to name a specific individual rather than a group. A People column per approver is how boards end up with eleven columns nobody reads.
That is the point at which a status column stops being enough. Natively you would build a second board or a set of conditional automations per case. Both work and both grow faster than the thing they are managing.
Where this template runs out
Worth knowing now rather than in four months.
A status column holds one value, so it cannot represent two of the three have agreed. It cannot show somebody the document they are approving — a Files column is a filename and an Open button. And it records the last click rather than the decision, so it cannot tell you which version of a drawing an approver had in front of them, or that the drawing was replaced on Thursday.
Signoff does the third one. Approvals routed in order, the documents previewed inside the request, and a record of which file versions each person saw — including reopening the approval when a file is replaced after somebody signed off, keeping their original decision as evidence of what they actually looked at.
Keep reading
Routing by amount so the person spending the money does not choose who signs it off, self-approval, and what a status column can prove about an authorised spend.
The date column people forget, why a reminder on a schedule becomes furniture within a fortnight, and what to chase instead of what is overdue.
What to do in the next twenty minutes when a file was replaced after sign-off, how to work out what each approver actually saw, and the habits that stop it recurring.
This page is enough to do that, and for a lot of teams it is the right answer. If you get to the third limitation, Signoff is free for three approvals a month with every feature turned on.