Overview of Plan Approvals

Introduction

Plan Approval Projects is where material is sent for review and signed off. Initiators upload or create material, reviewers are notified as soon as something is waiting for them, and the status of every piece of material is visible in one place. This covers both simple and multi-step approval workflows.

Plan is one of the products in the Papirfly suite, alongside Point, Place, Produce, Prove and Plus. It is a standalone product, so you do not need any of the others to use it. It is most useful next to Place and Produce: material created from a Produce template, or stored in your Place library, can be sent straight into an approval loop, so what ends up published is on brand.

Where Plan Approvals sits

Plan is split into two separate products, which you reach from the product switcher in the top-left corner:

• Approval projects: review and sign-off, covered in this section.
• Campaign projects: campaign planning, budgets and funds.

This article and the rest of this section cover approval projects only.

What you can send for approval

Approval projects are grouped by the kind of material they hold, and each group is split into a Central hierarchy and a Local hierarchy, so head office and local units can run their own projects alongside each other. Which groups appear depends on how your portal is set up. The two you are most likely to see are:

• Place approvals: approval of assets from your Place library. As an initiator you upload the asset directly into the approval project, and it waits for a reviewer.
• Produce approvals: approval of material built from a Produce template. The approval loop is started from the template itself.

Select a project in the left-hand panel to see everything currently in it. For more on the two hierarchies, see Central and Local approval projects.

Who does what

There are three roles in an approval project:

• Administrator: sees all projects, creates new ones, and adds reviewers.
• Initiator: starts approval loops by creating a template creative or uploading a Place asset, and uploads new versions of their own material.
• Reviewer: sees the projects they have been added to, comments and annotates, and approves, rejects or sends material back for changes.

Initiators and reviewers are together referred to as collaborators, and are configured in the project’s User settings. For the full set of options, including whether initiators may approve their own material or edit each other’s, see User roles, Initiators vs. Reviewers definition.

How an approval runs

1. An initiator uploads an asset or creates material from a template in the approval project.
2. Reviewers are notified that something is waiting for them.
3. A reviewer opens the material, and can comment and annotate directly on it.
4. The reviewer sets a status from the drop-down in the upper-right corner of the preview.
5. If changes are needed, the initiator uploads a new version and the loop continues, so everyone stays on the same item instead of starting again.

The project overview lists everything in the project with its current status, file type, who requested it and the review deadline, with overdue items flagged.

Reviewing an item

Opening an item shows the current version with its comment thread. Numbered pins mark annotations on the material itself, the version selector switches between versions, and earlier versions stay available in the left-hand rail.

Approval statuses

• Pending review: submitted and waiting for a reviewer.
• Approved: signed off.
• Rejected: turned down.
• Needs change: sent back to the initiator for rework.

See How to approve/reject material and Different approval statuses.

Strict and relaxed workflows

Each approval project runs in one of two modes:

• Strict (default): material can only be updated while it is in Needs change. Once approved or rejected, it is final.
• Relaxed: new versions can also be added while material is in Pending review, and approved or rejected Produce documents can be restored. The workflow restarts from stage 1 after any update.

Relaxed mode is a per-project setting, available when the project is created and afterwards to an Approval Administrator. See Relaxed approval workflows.

Next steps

• Navigating to Plan Approval Projects
• Creating a new approval project
• Uploading an asset for approval in Plan
• How to make a comment on material
• Advanced search and filtering