Run an approval

An approval is a recorded decision about exact wording. This guide sets one up, walks the sign-off, and states precisely what survives an edit — because that is the part that differs from initialling a printout.

Require approval

In the document’s access settings, turn on Require approval and name the approvers. Each approver entry is a person or a team, and the rule is strict: every titled section needs a sign-off from every entry; within a team, any one member satisfies that team’s entry. Two named approvers means two sign-offs per section, not one from either.

Sign off, section by section

Approval happens per titled section — including nested ones, so 1.1 and 1.1.1 are approvable on their own. An approver signs off the sections they are satisfied with; there is no single “approve everything” act, because a document is rarely wrong everywhere or right everywhere at once.

What a sign-off binds to

An approval binds to the exact wording that was on screen when it was given — not to a version number. That has two consequences, both deliberate:

• Unchanged sections stay approved. New versions, other people’s edits elsewhere, reordering around it — none of that touches a section whose own wording is unchanged. Nobody re-approves work they already approved.
• Any edit voids the affected approvals, automatically. Changing a subsection voids that subsection’s approval and the approval of every section that contains it. There is no way to slip a change under an existing sign-off, and no one has to remember to reset anything.

The document while approval is incomplete

Nothing is locked. The document can be edited, commented and exported at every point — but while any section still lacks a required sign-off, every generated PDF carries a DRAFT · UNAPPROVED watermark. The watermark is not a setting; it derives from the approval state and disappears the moment the last section is signed off.

When it will not work

Someone who is not named as an approver (directly or through a team) cannot sign anything off, whatever their document role — approving and editing are separate powers on purpose. And a sign-off given to old wording is not transferable to new wording: if a section changed, the only path is reading it again and approving it again.