Setting response times and tracking review time in Plan approval projects

An approval project can give Approvers a fixed time to respond. When you turn that on, every asset gets a deadline, the project table shows how long each review took, and you can choose which of those columns to show. This article covers the settings and what they do.

Set a response time

Response times are set per project. Turn on Advanced deadline settings when you create the project, or later from the project menu (the three dots beside the project name) under Edit project. Plan describes the setting as "Set time allowed for approvers responses." The fields below it appear as soon as it is on.

• Response time is set in days and hours, for example 1 day and 2 hours.
• Restart countdown with new version gives every new version of an asset a fresh deadline. See below.
• Working time only leaves weekends and public holidays out of the count. Plan describes it as "Weekends and public holidays are excluded." When you tick it, two more required fields appear: Country, which decides the public holidays, and Time zone, which Plan describes as "The timezone setting ensures that deadlines, weekends and holidays are calculated consistently across all reviews in the project."

The deadline is counted from the moment the asset is submitted. In the example above, with a response time of 1 day and 2 hours, working time only and Sweden as the country, an asset uploaded on a Friday at 10:00 got a deadline of Monday at 12:00. The weekend was skipped.

The same fields are in the Create project dialog for Produce approval projects. See Creating an approval project in Plan for the rest of the dialog.

Where the deadline shows up

Each asset in the project table gets a Deadline with the exact date and time and a live countdown underneath, such as "Due in 1d 1h 59m". On the review page the countdown sits in the header next to the status. Once the review is finished, the countdown is replaced by how long it took, for example "Done in 18m". Assets in a project without Advanced deadline settings have an empty Deadline column.

Two more columns fill in as the review goes on:

• First contact shows how long it took before an Approver first acted on the asset, and who it was.
• Approval Time shows the total time from submission until the review was finished, and the Approved column shows when that happened.

Times are shown in days, hours and minutes.

Give every new version its own deadline

With Restart countdown with new version ticked, the countdown starts again each time a new version of the asset is uploaded, so Approvers always get the full response time for the version in front of them. Each version keeps its own deadline. Open the version list on the review page (the V2 or V3 button above the preview) and choose Versions overview to see them side by side, together with what each Approver did and when.

In the example above, version 1 was uploaded at 10:00, version 2 at 10:09 and version 3 at 10:19. Each has its own deadline, and the two earlier versions are marked as done while version 3 is still pending. The icon at the end of each row opens the list of Approvers for that version with their due status.

When the option is off, the deadline is counted from the first version. Turning it off on a project with several versions moved the deadline back to the one calculated from the first upload.

Choose which columns to show

With the extra columns the project table gets wide. Click the settings icon at the right end of the table header to choose which columns to show and in what order.

In Table settings, Asset name is locked and always stays first. Every other column has a checkbox to show or hide it, arrows to move it up or down, and a handle to drag it. Click Save to apply. Plan confirms with "Project table settings saved successfully", and the table keeps the layout when you come back to the project.