monday has no approvals feature. What it has is status columns and automations, and for a lot of teams that is genuinely enough. Here is how to build it properly, and the three places it stops working.
The native build
Not one column per department, which is the mistake almost everybody makes first.
The instinct is a column per approver group — a Legal column, a Finance column, a Marketing column. It looks tidy on day one. By day thirty the board has eight columns, nobody can tell which stage an item is actually sitting in without reading four cells, and every new department needs its own automation.
Use one status column and give it labels that describe where the work is, not who has it:
Then one automation per transition — when status changes to With legal, notify [person]. Six labels and five automations covers a three-stage approval, and the board stays readable.
Add a date column recording when it entered its current stage. Without it you cannot answer the only operational question that matters — what has been sitting somewhere too long — and you will end up asking people in Slack instead, which is the thing you were trying to stop.
The label everybody forgets
Not a softer word for rejected.
Most things that do not pass are not refusals. They are this is fine except the total is out by a line, or move that sentence and I will sign it. If your only options are Approved and Rejected, all of those get marked Rejected, and within a month the word tells you nothing — half your rejections are near-misses and nobody can tell which.
Give yourself a third label that routes back to whoever asked, rather than back to the start. And make it impossible to use without saying what needs changing: sending work back with nothing to act on leaves the requester with no way forward, which is how things stall for a week and then get approved out of exhaustion.
Where it stops
Worth knowing before you build, so you know what you are choosing.
1. Several people approving one thing. A status column stores one value. With three approvers it can record the last person who clicked, and it cannot represent “two of the three have agreed”. The native workaround is a status and a people column per approver plus a rollup automation. It works and it costs you two columns per approver.
2. Showing somebody the thing they are approving. A file in a Files column is a filename with an Open button, and an approver in a hurry will skip it and approve on the strength of the item’s title. That is the failure this whole process exists to prevent, reintroduced at the last step.
3. Evidence, six months later. This is the expensive one. A status column records the last click. It does not record when each person agreed, what version they were looking at, or that the drawing was replaced after they signed. When a revision is disputed, “the file was attached to the item” and “the person who approved it had that version in front of them” are very different statements, and only the second settles anything.
Questions
Natively, only as a guest on a shared board — and monday gives you three free guests per account, charging for the fourth. For a client who needs to say yes to one proof twice a quarter, that is a seat bought so somebody can click a button. It is also the single biggest reason external approvals sit unanswered: creating a login is more friction than the decision is worth.
Use “when status changes to [specific label]” rather than “when status changes”. Plain “status changes” fires on every movement of that column, including the one your approval makes when it finishes — so approving something raises a fresh approval on the thing just approved, forever.
Yes, almost always. Splitting them across boards loses the item's history at every hop, and the history is the part you will want later. One board, one status column, and a view filtered to what is waiting.
What we built
The other two you can do natively, and this page has told you how.
Approvals routed in order, the documents previewed inside the request rather than linked, and a record of which file versions each person had on screen — including, when a file is replaced after somebody approved it, reopening the approval and keeping their original decision as a record of what they actually saw.
Approvers outside your company sign with a link that names one person, decides one approval, and expires. No monday seat, no login.
Free for three approvals a month with every feature turned on, and there is a sample you can click through without installing anything.
Three approvals a month, free, every feature turned on. Enough to find out whether the record is worth having before anybody pays for anything.