Using Monday.com Automations with Approvals

Automations are one of the most powerful features in monday.com and can bring real benefits to you and your team. Instead of wasting time on tasks that can be automated, monday.com can do the work for you giving you time back that can be spent more productively.

Using these built-in monday.com automations with Approvals can really help you take project management to the next level. There are plenty of automation options to choose from but we will focus on the most important ones below.

Email notifications

By default, the Approvals for monday.com app comes with built-in email notifications that automatically updates approvers when when items are waiting for their review.

However, there may be situations where you need other people to be notified about the approval status of a project or item, even if they are not part of the process itself. For example, you may be working with an external agency or other stakeholders in the business.

Using the notification automation in monday.com can be really useful in this scenario. It helps remove the need to message or email different stakeholders manually, allowing you to focus on the task and hand whilst knowing they are being kept in the loop - automatically.

To set up notification automations in monday.com, you need to:

1. Open your monday.com board

2. Head over to Automate

3. Click on Notification

4. Set up the automation as shown below (choosing the right person for your situation of course)

5. Click on Add to Board

And that’s it. The automation is set up and ready to go!

Status changes

When an item’s status changes you can use automation to trigger specific actions. In the context of Approvals, when an items status changes from “In Review” to “Approved” you could use automation to move items within your monday.com board, change the due date of an item or notify specific people.

In this example, we will show how to automatically move an item from one group to another in your monday.com | Work Without Limits board, when the status changes. So, if an item’s status changes to “Approved” we want to move this item to the “Approved” group.

This automation can help you keep a track of your items as they progress through the approval process. It is particularly useful if you are managing a large number of projects or tasks within your monday.com board.

To set up this status change automation, you need to:

1. Open your monday.com board

2. Head over to Automate

3. Click on Status Change

4. Set up the automation as shown below

5. Click on Add to Board

Due Dates

You may have projects that have a specific due date or project completion. In monday.com you can add different types of columns to your Board and these can be used to display due dates.

When managing approvals, you may wish to change the due date depending on the progress of the items approval. For example, if an item is rejected you may want to push back the due date to give you time to make the amendments.

By using the automation built into monday.com with Approvals, you can easily automate this process. In this example, the company has a policy that requires approval cycles to take a minimum of 3 days, therefore if an item is rejected we want to add 3 days to the due date column.

To set up the due date automation, you need to:

1. Open your monday.com board

2. Head over to Automate

3. Click on Due Dates

4. Set up the automation as shown below

5. Click on Add to Board

Item Creation 

This automation can help you streamline the creation and management of new items on your monday.com board.

For example, when a new item is created you could use automation to set its Approval Status as “On Hold”. This can be really useful to quickly identify projects and items that are not yet in review but also ensures a process is being following from the very beginning.

To set up the item creation automation, just follow these steps:

1. Open your monday.com board

2. Head over to Automate

3. Click on Item Creation

4. Set up the automation as shown below

5. Click on Add to Board

Move Item 

This automation is similar to the “Status Changes” automation above but with a twist. When it comes to managing projects it can sometimes be difficult to get a quick overview of projects that are at risk.

In this automation, we will use a similar approach as before but after 3 days have lapsed, if the item status has not changed it will automatically move to the “Urgently Need Assistance” group. This will flag that the item is delayed and enables you to take action or discuss it with stakeholders to get the project back on track.

To set up this type of move item automation, you need to:

1. Open your monday.com board

2. Head over to Automate

3. Click on Move Item

4. Set up the automation as shown below

5. Click on Add to Board

Subitems 

Many projects are often made up of a number of small tasks. In monday.com these can be represented as Subitems.

You can use the automation in monday.com to update the main (parent) item’s approval status based on the status of the Subitem. For example, if you had a main item with 5 subitems associated with it, you can use automation to automatically change the main item’s status to “In Progress” when one of the Subitems' Approval Status changes to “In Review”.

This can help keep the work in the monday.com board flowing and if any stakeholders need an update on a project’s status, the automation will help this up to date for you.

Before you can begin automating sub-items, you need to create them first. You can do this by:

1. Clicking on the item you want the subitem for

2. Head over to the Column Center

3. Click on Subitem

4. Name the Subitem

Once created, you then need to add the Approvals for monday.com approval process to your subitems:

1. Open the Subitem

2. Click on Approvals

3. Set up the Columns

   1. when choosing the Approval Column, set up an Approval Status Column in your subitem

   2. when choosing then Status Text Column, set up an Approval Progress Column in your subitem

   3. for Approvers Column, choose Approvers added in your subitem

   4. for Approval Needed, choose the number of approvals needed for a subitem to be accepted (this could be aligned with your company’s policies and procedures)

   5. for Rejection Needed, choose the number of approvals needed for a subitem to be rejected (this could be aligned with your company’s policies and procedures)

Finally, you just need to add the automation to your Subitems by following these steps:

1. Open your monday.com board

2. Head over to Automate

3. Click on Subitems

4. Set up the automation as shown below

5. Click on Add to Board

Dependencies 

Dependencies allow you to specify which item should be completed before another item, or which items are related.

The automation functionality can be used with Approvals to change the Approval Status of an item based on the status of dependencies. For example, if Item X was dependent on Item Y but Item X has been rejected in the approval process, you can use automation to automatically change the approval status of Item Y to “On Hold”.

This is a great way of maintaining the relationships between projects so that if status changes occur in the approval process of an item, it automatically updates the dependencies on your board.

Before we can set up the automation, let’s create your dependencies:

1. Open your monday.com board

2. Click on the + sign

3. Click on More Columns

4. Type “Dependencies” in the Column Center

5. Click on Connect Columns

6. Choose the items that the main item will depend on

Now that your dependencies are set up, let’s add automation to them:

1. Open your monday.com board

2. Head over to Automate

3. Click on Dependency

4. Set up the automation as shown below

5. Click on Add to Board

if you would like any support setting up automations with Approvals for http://monday.com , reach out to our team and we’ll be happy to help.