Somebody signed off on Tuesday. The file was replaced on Thursday. The approval still sits there, green, apparently covering a document nobody agreed to — and you have found out because something went out wrong. Here is what to do in the next twenty minutes.
First
Before working out what happened.
If the work is still in progress — a print run queued, an order about to be placed, a contract about to be countersigned — pause it first. Everything else on this page keeps for twenty minutes. A press run does not.
Do not overwrite anything else. The instinct is to put the correct file back immediately, and it destroys the evidence you are about to need. Add the correct version alongside; leave what is there.
Then
Two timestamps, lined up.
Open the item’s Activity Log. It records who moved the status to Approved, and when. Write that time down for each approver.
Now open the Files column and look at the upload date of every document. Anything uploaded after an approval was not in front of that person. Anything uploaded before it probably was — probably, because a file being attached does not prove anybody opened it.
If the file was overwritten rather than added, the earlier version is gone and the upload date is the only trace. Check whoever produced it for the original — a designer’s working folder, an email attachment, a supplier’s sent items. You want the actual document, not a description of it.
Then
Including the approvers themselves.
The approvers are the people most exposed by this: their name is against a decision they did not make. Tell them before anybody else asks them about it. What to say is short and it is better said badly than late:
Then re-approve properly, against the file that is actually current, with the version named in writing.
Afterwards
None of them requires buying anything.
1. Never overwrite a file. Put the revision in the filename — bracket-rev-C.pdf, then bracket-rev-D.pdf beside it. This one habit prevents most of what went wrong today, because it makes the substitution visible instead of silent.
2. Name the version in the approval itself. Not “approved” but “approved rev C”. It takes four extra characters and it turns a click into a statement somebody can check.
3. Decide, once, what a replacement means. Does uploading a new file re-open the approval, or not? Either answer is defensible. Having no answer is what produced today — because the default, in every tool that stores a status rather than a decision, is that nothing happens at all and nobody is told.
The third one is the hard one, because it depends on a person noticing. And if noticing is a person’s job, then on a busy week nobody does it.
Questions
Not for the new file. Somebody agreed to a specific document at a specific time, and replacing that document does not extend their agreement to whatever replaced it. The approval is still valid evidence — of the old version. What it is not is cover for the current one.
monday’s activity log gives you the time the status changed, and the item’s Files column gives you upload dates. Line the two up: anything uploaded after the approval time was not what they saw. If a file was overwritten rather than added, the upload date is the only trace left and the earlier version is gone.
Ask whoever the change could plausibly affect. A corrected typo does not need the finance director again; a changed dimension, price or clause needs everybody whose reason for agreeing depended on it. When in doubt, re-ask — the cost is an email and the alternative is discovering the answer in a dispute.
What we built
This is the entire reason it exists.
Every decision records which version of each file was on the approver’s screen, and which documents they had opened before deciding. When a file is replaced after somebody approved it, the approval reopens itself — and the earlier decision is kept, struck through, as a record of what that person actually saw rather than being quietly overwritten.
So the twenty minutes above becomes a line on the item, and the conversation with the approver happens on Thursday instead of after something has already gone out wrong.
Keep reading
What a dashboard widget genuinely solves, why a cross-board view quietly stops matching some boards, and the half of the problem a list of items cannot cover.
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.
Three approvals a month, free, every feature turned on. Replace a file after approving it and watch what happens.