Approval workflows

Read time: 7 minutes. Who it's for: Merchants who need internal sign-off before a proposal goes to a buyer, or whose buyers' procurement teams need to sign off before they can accept.

⚠️ Approval workflows require the Professional plan or higher. Lite and Starter merchants see the policy editor but can't create policies. Professional includes linear multi-step chains; parallel + conditional steps, timeout escalation, and delegation are Enterprise features. See Plans, trial, and billing.

QuotWay supports two sides of approval:

• Merchant-side - sales rep proposes; sales manager approves before the proposal sends to the buyer.
• Buyer-side - buyer submits; purchasing manager approves; then finance approves; then the quote is officially accepted (B2B-capable stores).

Both sides share the same policy structure: steps + actors per step + optional parallel groups + optional conditional rules.

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Anatomy of a policy

A policy has:

• Domain - MERCHANT or BUYER.
• Trigger condition - when does this policy apply? Examples:
  • Quote total > $50,000
  • Quote contains products in collection X
  • "Discount %" or "Deepest line discount %" above a threshold - each line is judged at what the buyer actually pays, so its share of any whole-quote (order) discount counts too
  • Buyer's customer tag contains enterprise
  • (No condition) - applies to every quote in the domain.
• Steps - ordered chain of approval steps. Each step has:
  • Actors - who can approve (one or more staff members, or one or more roles).
  • Mode - ALL (every actor must approve) or ANY (one approval clears the step).
  • Optional conditional rule - skip this step if X.

A policy is active when it has at least one step + the Enabled toggle is on.

Worked example A - Single-step merchant approval

Scenario: every quote over $10K needs a sales manager to approve before the proposal goes out.

Policy:

• Domain: MERCHANT
• Trigger: quote.totalEstimate > 10000
• Steps:
  1. Sales manager review - actor: staff:sales-manager-1 - mode: ANY.

That's it. When a sales rep clicks Send proposal on a $12K quote, the proposal status flips to AWAITING_MERCHANT_APPROVAL. The sales manager gets an email + an in-app notification. They review → approve → the proposal sends.

If they reject, the rep gets a notification with the rejection reason and can edit + re-submit.

Worked example B - Buyer-side, multi-step, parallel

Scenario: your enterprise buyer's procurement team needs 3 sign-offs:

1. Purchasing manager
2. EITHER finance OR legal (parallel - whichever signs first)
3. CFO

Policy:

• Domain: BUYER
• Trigger: quote.total > 100000
• Steps:
  1. Purchasing manager review - actor: assigned per quote (defaults to buyer's company purchasing role) - mode: ANY.
  2. Finance OR Legal review - parallelGroup: 1 - actors: finance + legal - mode: ANY (first one to approve clears).
  3. CFO final - actor: assigned per quote - mode: ANY.

When the buyer hits Accept on the proposal, the quote status flips to AWAITING_BUYER_APPROVAL. QuotWay surfaces the chain in the buyer portal: "Step 1 of 3 - Purchasing manager review".

Worked example C - Conditional skip

Scenario: standard quotes go through one approval; quotes for a specific high-priority customer skip approval entirely.

Policy:

• Domain: MERCHANT
• Trigger: (no condition - applies to everything)
• Steps:
  1. Sales manager review - actor: sales manager - mode: ANY - conditional: skip if customer.tags contains "auto-approve".

The auto-approve flag bypasses step 1 entirely for tagged customers. Useful for managing a small VIP roster without maintaining two parallel policies.

Editing policies

1. Admin → Approvals → New policy (or open an existing one). New policies offer templates for the common cases - start from one and tweak, or build from scratch.
2. The editor is a top-to-bottom flow: When (who reviews + the trigger) → Which quotes (scope + conditions) → your steps → Then (what happens once the chain approves).
3. Add steps with the + buttons on the flow. For each step:
   • Pick the approvers (specific staff, a role, or buyer contacts for buyer-side policies).
   • To run a step in parallel with the one above it, tick "Run at the same time as the previous step".
   • Conditional skips live under "Add a condition to this step"; time limits, escalation targets, delegation and rationale live under the step's Advanced settings.
4. Save.
5. Enable the policy when you're ready.

You can have multiple policies. They evaluate in priority order; the first matching policy wins.

Deleting a policy also deletes the completed approval chains and decisions recorded under it, and removing a step from a policy deletes the past decisions recorded on that step. To retire a policy and keep its history, turn Enabled off instead. A policy with a chain still in progress can't be deleted.

Approval state in the inbox

The quote inbox shows the current state of each pending approval:

• AWAITING_MERCHANT_APPROVAL - merchant-side; sales manager owes a decision.
• AWAITING_BUYER_APPROVAL - buyer-side; buyer's chain in progress.

Open the quote detail → Approvals tab to see the full chain: each step's status, who owes the next action, and the elapsed time in the current step.

Escalation

On Enterprise, a step can have a time limit under its Advanced settings. When a step waits past it, the hourly approval-escalation-check cron takes the action you chose: send a reminder, reassign the step to someone else, or approve or reject it automatically. An automatic approval or rejection is recorded as a decision by the system, with a rationale saying it timed out.

A chain still open 7 days after it started is logged as a MerchantEvent('approval_chain_stuck_7d') for analytics.

To move a step by hand, its approver can delegate it from the quote - see Approval delegation.

What approval looks like to the buyer

Buyers on B2B-capable stores see the approval chain in the Customer Account UI extension OR the hosted portal - depending on which path your store uses. Each step shows:

• Status badge (PENDING / ACTIVE / APPROVED / REJECTED).
• The actor's role label (PII like names are redacted from the buyer view unless the buyer is themselves a chain member).
• The action button if the current viewer is the active actor.

Approval delegation

When a step allows it (Allow the approver to delegate this step, under the step's Advanced settings - Enterprise), an approver who can't act can delegate that step from the quote to another active staff member, with an optional note. Buyer-side approvers delegate to another contact by email. Delegation is per step, not for a period of time: the delegate takes over that step's decision, the original approver can no longer decide it, the hand-over is recorded with the step's decisions, and it doesn't route back on its own.

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Common gotchas

• Policy editor blocked with "Upgrade required". You're on Lite or Starter. Approval workflows need Professional+.
• Step fires but the actor doesn't get an email. Check that the actor's StaffMember record has an email address. Shopify sometimes hides staff emails from the API - see Troubleshooting.
• Conditional skip never triggers. The conditional uses the same rule format as Targeting (see Targeting rules). Verify the condition matches the quote's actual data.
• Parallel group with both mode: ALL actors. That works but reads as "everyone in the group must approve, in any order". Often you want mode: ANY instead.

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Related articles

• Partial acceptance and split conversion - what happens after an approved proposal gets accepted.
• Buyer portal vs customer account - where buyer-side approvals surface.