Four steps to a working approval, then the automation that means nobody has to remember to send one. If anything here does not match what you see, that is our mistake and we would like to hear about it.
Getting started
In the order you will actually do them.
Add it from monday, choose the account, and open any item on the board you want it on. At the end of the tabs — Updates, Files, Activity — press the plus and pick “Approvals”. That is a one-time step per board; after it, Signoff is just another tab.
Click who has to sign off. Add more than one and they are asked in order — one stage at a time. Attach the files they should look at: images are previewed inside the request rather than linked, other formats are named with their version, and the decision records which documents each person had actually opened.
“Move the item when it is decided” lists the status columns already on your board. Pick one and Signoff matches the labels you already use, so your existing automations keep firing. Leave it on “Do not change anything” and Signoff records the decision and touches nothing.
The automation recipe raises approvals without anybody opening the panel. Set it up once per board — see below.
The automation
One recipe, set up once on each board that needs it.
In your board, open Automations, then Explore integrations, and find Signoff. The recipe reads:
Choose the status that means “this needs signing off” — usually a label you already have, like Needs approval or Ready for review — and the people who have to agree.
Why that trigger and not plain “status changes”. Plain “status changes” fires on every movement of that column, including the one Signoff itself makes when something is approved. That would raise a fresh approval on the thing just approved, forever. Naming the status that starts an approval is both the sentence you want and the one that stops.
Running the same recipe twice on one item is safe. A run against an item that already has an approval in flight succeeds and changes nothing.
Outside your company
A client, an agency, an outside engineer, a landlord’s agent.
Open the approval, then More options → Send a link. You get an address to email them yourself. It names one person, decides one approval, and expires — fourteen days at the very longest.
They see the request, the documents previewed, and three buttons: approve, request changes, or decline. There is no account to create and no seat to buy. Their decision lands in the same trail as everybody else’s, marked as having come from outside.
monday charges for guests past the third on most plans. This costs nothing, because the person never enters your account.
Permissions
monday’s consent screen is worded broadly. Here is the specific thing behind each line.
To know which person is deciding, so the trail carries a name rather than an id.
To offer the people on a board as approvers, and to read the file names attached to the item you are getting approved.
To write each decision into the item’s own updates, so it is visible to people who never open the app.
To set one status column, on one item, when a decision is made — and nothing else, ever. This is optional: choose “Do not change anything” when you send an approval and nothing is written at all.
Signoff has no mail access of any kind, never reads the contents of your files — only a name and a version marker — and stores your approvals in your own monday account rather than in a database of ours. The full policy
Questions that come up
Yes. Signoff publishes a skill to monday's own assistant, so you can say “send this to legal for approval” instead of opening the panel. The language understanding is monday's; what reaches Signoff is the same few fields the panel would have sent. We hold no model credentials and call no model of our own.
Open it and use Hand it on. It goes to whoever you choose, and the trail records that the first person passed it along rather than pretending they decided. Signoff also notices when an approval is waiting on somebody who has left the account, and says so.
Signoff works out which approvals have gone quiet and shows you — this has been waiting four days on Dana; chase it, or leave it? It never sends anything in your name without you choosing. Telling somebody’s manager that work is held up is a social act, not a setting.
The approval is flagged and reopened, and the original decision is kept as the record of what that person actually saw. Use Ask them again to send it back round.
Open any approval and use Download the record. You get a self-contained document — who decided, when, how, which version of each file was in front of them, and which documents they had not opened. It states plainly what it does and does not prove.
The first fourteen days are unlimited, and the clock starts the first time somebody opens the panel rather than when the app is installed. After that: three approvals a month with every feature turned on. The panel shows what you have used, so the third is never a surprise, and anything already raised carries on working — decisions, reminders, the trail and the record. The count resets on the first of the month.
Nowhere. They were written to your own monday account and they are still there. There is nothing to request back from us, because we never had a copy.
Plans
Billed by monday, on the card you already have with them. Cancel in your own account, with no notice period. Terms
Support is answered by the people who build it, usually the same day. We cannot see inside your account, so what you tell us is what we have to work from.