How approvals work in Govflo

Approvals exist so that the person who did the work is not necessarily the person who decides it can be released. Where a workflow requires sign-off, Govflo will not release without it.

Separation of duties

A supervisor, a records officer or counsel may need to look at a release before it goes. In a dispute, the question of who authorized a release needs an answer separate from who performed it.

That is what the Approver role is for. An approver reviews and records decisions, and frequently holds no casework permissions at all: they may not be able to work a request, only to decide on one.

What can require approval

What needs approval is set per kind of redaction, under Settings, then Records & Compliance, then Redaction Rules. Each built-in PII category and each word match rule carries an Approval toggle, so your agency decides which withholdings need a second person and which do not.

The four decisions

Decision	Effect
Approve	The work may proceed
Reject	The work may not proceed
Request changes	Sent back with what needs to change
Leave pending	No action taken yet

Every decision is written to the request's history with who decided and when.

Decisions are not edited

A decision is part of the permanent record and is never rewritten. Changing your mind produces a new decision recorded alongside the old one, not a replacement for it.

That is the difference between a record and a note. A decision trail that can be quietly amended has no value in a dispute, which is the one moment it exists for.

The rule that no configuration overrides

A document whose redaction verification comes back unclean will not release on its own, even when the release looks routine and even when the person handling it holds every other permission. It waits for a human.

There is no setting that turns this off. The product is built to defer to a person rather than release material it cannot verify.

While a workflow is being changed

Approvals already in progress follow the workflow they began under. A change to a workflow applies to work reaching an approval step afterwards, so a decision in progress is never altered mid-review.