Approvals start on one board. A year later they are on six, owned by four teams, and the only person who knows what is outstanding is whoever asks in Slack. This is the point at which people go looking for a tool, and the first thing worth knowing is that monday can already do most of it.
The native answer
Start here before buying anything.
Create a dashboard, connect the boards where approvals live, and add a Table widget. Filter it to your approving statuses and to the person. You now have one list of everything waiting, across boards, and it updates itself.
For a team whose boards were built by the same person in the same month, this is the whole problem solved and there is nothing else to do.
Where it goes wrong
And boards drift, because people build them separately.
A cross-board filter matches on column and label. So the marketing board calling it Status and the engineering board calling it Approval are invisible to each other. Needs approval and Needs Approval are two different labels. A board somebody created last month, from a template, is simply missing.
The failure is quiet, which is the problem. The dashboard does not say “three boards did not match”. It shows a shorter list, and a shorter list of outstanding approvals looks like good news.
If you take one thing from this page: whenever you build a cross-board view, count the boards it is reading and check that number against the boards that exist. Do it again in three months.
The other half
Which matters more the more people are involved.
A dashboard row tells you an item is sitting in an approving status. It cannot tell you which of the three approvers has already agreed, because a status column holds one value and that value is not a tally.
It also cannot tell you how long this stage has been open — only how long the item has, unless somebody built a date column and an automation to maintain it on every board. And it cannot order the list by who is holding up whom, which is the order you actually want to work through.
Questions
Yes. A dashboard can pull from multiple boards and a Table widget will list items across all of them, filtered by status and person. For approvals living on a handful of boards that share a column structure, this is genuinely the answer and it costs nothing.
Almost always because the boards do not share the same column. A filter on a status column named “Status” cannot see a board that calls it “Approval”, and a label spelt “Needs approval” on one board and “Needs Approval” on another are two different labels. Cross-board filtering is only as good as the naming discipline underneath it.
It depends on your plan, and the limit is lower than most people expect when they design around it — check yours before building a view that assumes every board. The practical limit arrives sooner anyway: a dashboard nobody maintains stops matching the boards within a quarter.
What we built
Because it is not built on matching column names.
Signoff stores the approval itself rather than reading a status column, so its list covers every board in the account without anybody configuring anything — including boards created after you started. There is nothing to keep in sync, because there is nothing being matched.
It is ordered by how long each has sat, shows which approvers have already agreed and which have not, and separates what is waiting on you from what you are waiting on somebody else for. Alongside it: what has been decided lately, and how long approvals are actually taking — by stage, so you can see which step the time goes into.
Add it as a board view once and it is account-wide from then on.
Keep reading
One board, one status column, and one automation per transition.
Why a status column cannot represent “two of the three have agreed”, the native workaround and what it costs, and when to stop working around it.
What guests actually cost, when a shareable board is the right answer, and how to get a signature from somebody who will never have a login.
Three approvals a month, free, every feature turned on — including the list across every board.