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Submitting a Document or Questionnaire for Approval

Important: If you submitted a document or questionnaire for review, you don't need to submit it to approval. The document/questionnaire will automatically be submitted to approval once all reviewers accept it.

If a content item's (document's or questionnaire's) template contains no required reviewers or if it does not include the Reviewers step, you can submit the draft item directly to approval, skipping the review step. You must assign at least one approver before submitting a content item for approval.

Note: Only the document owner or an administrator can submit a draft document or questionnaire for approval.

After submitting a content item for approval, each assigned approver has the option to accept, revise, or decline the document or to accept or decline the questionnaire. As each approver acts on the content item, you receive a notification email (if your email subscription settings include these types of notifications). When all approvers have finished, you receive another email notification, and the item is sent to one of two places. If one or more approvers revise or decline the item, it is sent back to Draft status. If all approvers accept the item, it is automatically published or started (unless it has been assigned a publication date sometime in the future, in which case it is moved to Pending status until that date).

You can also check approver status from the Overview page (see Working with the Overview for details). To access the content item while it is in approval status, see Searching for a Content Item or Browsing for a Content Item.

Find and open the document or questionnaire in the Draft, Collaboration, or Review status (see Searching for a Content Item or Browsing for a Content Item).
Click , and then click Submit for Approval.

(Conditional) If the document/questionnaire has any assigned reviewers who have not finished yet, a window similar to the following is displayed. To skip any unfinished reviewers and submit the document/questionnaire for approval, click OK.

(Optional) In the Submit for Approval window, delete the default text—New Document, New Questionnaire, or New Version—and then type the purpose of the new content item or a summary of changes for its new version. Any of the content item's reviewers, approvers, and assignees will be able to see your comments.

(Optional) To add what you wrote to this content item's discussion board, click Post to Discussion Board (see Working with Discussions for details).
Click Submit.
In the Results window, click OK.

Note: If no approvers have been assigned yet, you will see a window like the one below. Click Go there now, assign one or more approvers, and then click Submit for Approval again.