7 Ways to Manage Approvals in ClickUp

If you're trying to figure out how to organize approvals in ClickUp, you are watching the right video. In this video, I'm going to go through seven different ways. I know seven, but trust me, they're all good in their own right. Seven different ways to manage the approval process in ClickUp. This could be something like your internal review. This could be a client review. This could be you just double checking something before it gets published. This is for you option number one and the simplest option of organizing approvals in ClickUp is an assigned comment that you manually create and assign to the person who needs to approve the thing. The benefits of this is that it is super simple, but the cons of this is that you have to manually type it every time. There's no due dates possible with assigned comments and it can be easily missed if people aren't good at notifications because assigned comments while yes they show up and list view if someone's living out of inbox view where things are governed by due dates, it can be very easy to miss these kinds of assigned comments. And while assigned comments do show up in me mode. So like this, you can kind of see that assigned comments are being considered here. As a manager, if you're looking to keep track of how many people have how many reviews on their plate, it's really hard to see that with assigned comments because all you have is the assigned comments icon and not a picture like you would with regular assignee. Option number two of managing your assignees in ClickUp is to actually use a status and this would be something like a to review status and you pair this with the time in status sort so you might have the status to review. You have the time and status custom field visible and then you sort it from oldest to newest to make sure that you're always working through your revisions as quickly as possible. The benefits of this method is it's really simple both to use and to set up. The downside of this is the status will then roll up to everything view and you've seen my video about why you should keep your status as simple and also I know Ask Evie's also done tons of videos on this topic. Complex statuses do not scale well. They do not play well with others. So by adding a status that might not always be applicable, you could add a little bit more chaos into your everything view. It can be difficult to know who should move it to the next status. I personally find it very frustrating in workspaces where you have a task and there's many statuses and you're supposed to know who owns which status. But it's purely memorization based. You don't have space inside the status itself to say who should move it to the next one. It's kind of just too small for that. And there's no way for us to use automations or other rules to make sure that someone who doesn't have permission doesn't move it into the wrong status. It requires a lot of memorization and can lead to people not moving things to the next status because they're not sure who owns each of those statuses. The other issue with using a status for this is once again, we don't incorporate due dates in any way. So if you have a revision that takes some substantial amount of time, you'd probably want to be able to have a due date for yourself to keep track of when you need to do that approval. The due date is governing when the task itself needs to be done. But your review process does not benefit from having its own due date. So you kind of just need to keep it in your brain. And again, I do not want to see people keeping these in their head because usually they'll just forget. Worse yet, you assign that to the person who's supposed to be giving the approval, but then that person thinks that they should mark the task complete because they did indeed revise it, but but then they finish the task when really all they did was finish the approval. It's very unclear as to what that person's job is because the task itself says one thing, but they're assigned to it. So should they complete the task or should they be doing something else that requires memorization? Which is always a sign that things could easily go wrong because a person just needs to know what they're supposed to do versus the system actually saying what they're supposed to do. Now we can start to remove some of these restrictions with option three, which rather than having a to review status, we have a to review list. So when something needs to be reviewed we use the tasks in multiple lists function in ClickUp. So that task will we then manually move it so that way it shows up also in the to review list. Perhaps we also set up an automation so that way when something is moved into the to review list a comment is added saying hey so and so it's time to review this. As long as your automations remind the person doing the reviewing to remove it from that review list when they're done, this can be a really nice way to keep things organized. However, a lot of the problems from the last method carry over to this. If I'm the person in the to review area and I see that due date, I would assume that's when I need to finish my revisions. Except it's not. That's the due date again for the overall project. So I need to have my due date be earlier. But I have no place to put that due date. The other problem, just like the old method, is that in the to review list, who should it be assigned to that automation assign it to the business owner always or is it dynamic based on certain things? How are they supposed to know? And again, just like the status, we need to start memorizing internally who moves it into the to review, who marks it out of the to review, how do you check off that you've done the review? Do you leave a comment? If so, what do you say in the comment? All those kinds of details we need to just memorize in our head so we know who is the right person to be doing the next step of the journey. These kinds of memory based things like with the old method will lead to people typically not moving things to the next status, being afraid to mark things out of to review and just kind of being a little slower to click things in ClickUp because they're not sure who the actual owner is because the assignee doesn't always tell them what they're actually supposed to do. Now option four are for the planners. If you have a process that has a set revision cycle, maybe you're a web designer and you include two rounds of revisions. You you work on fiverr, you have two revisions in your logo package. Those kinds of situations in your actual template for your service product. Whatever you're doing, just build in these as a checklist or subtask. You would call these checklists or subtask items get approval from XYZ and you would assign it to the correct person. The benefits of this are that they are baked into your templates. You know you have two revisions, you have the two subtasks done. Perfect. Awesome. Now the downside of this method is those tasks are gonna be sitting there waiting no matter where the project is in the flow. So it's if you have a web design project with three revisions, those three revisions are going to be visible in your template from day one, which can be kind of confusing for the person doing the revising to know, wait, is this ready for revision? Is this not ready for revision? While you can have certain dependencies in there which could certainly help with this, that's always going to be kind of a known issue. And if something only needs one layer of revisions but you have three built out, sometimes you end up having to delete tasks and once again the leading tasks is a human trying to remember should I do this? Should I not do this? Do I trust the system or do I not trust the system? And every time we have human memory competing with the technology and the memory wins because you know better than the tool, it lowers your trust in the tool just that little bit because you're thinking, well the ClickUp says we have three revisions, but I know we only have one. So ClickUp is less trustworthy than I thought. Method number five Custom field for the review process. You can have this custom field have a few different options such as not ready to review to review needs revisions when approved. And based on this custom field you can even set up automations that when something is in ready to review it shoots off a comment to remind the person who needs to do it that they need to do the task. Because this is a custom field, you can create a view to help you see all of these in one place and maybe even embed it into a dashboard. But because it's not a status, it won't show up in everything view and won't clutter up all the other areas in your account. Option number six is using the subtask custom field like we talked about before, rather than having an automated assigned comment, we automate a subtask being created. And inside the subtask it could say something like go up to parent task and review this for completion. When you are done, mark this subtask complete, blah blah blah. The pros of this is it's easy to adjust and automatic. Once you set it up, it allows the reviewer to have their own due date which is really really important so that they know they can mark things as complete when they are done by doing the subtask and being assigned the subtask that they are a watcher on the subtask on the revision process, but they are not made a watcher on the overall task. So as that task goes through the rest of its life cycle, me as the reviewer, I'm not going to be getting tons of notifications down the line because all I'm involved in watching is that subtask. Unless you have that setting on it makes you a watcher of everything, which I would suggest turning that off. And if you don't know how to turn off those notifications, go up to this watcher video and you'll see that There. The cons of this method is it requires the person to complete the subtask, but they also have to go up to the main task in order to reference it. Also, if you have a custom field for moving it out of the to review, that person who's doing the review also needs to go back up to the parent task and change the custom field to say is it needs revisions or is it approved? They need to do that extra step as well. Now finally, the last option is to combine all of these methods to build a best in class approvals method. So this option uses a lot of the same methods as before. We have our dropdown custom field. We when it's ready for review we have an automated subtask created that tells us to review it and we have the review tag so we can report on it. And when that custom field changes from to review to approved, we also have an automation that says it's approved that goes out to make sure that the assignee knows exactly what stage the project is at. So in this video we talked about the many different ways to organize an approval system in ClickUp. I gave you a few different screenshots to help you understand. As with all things in ClickUp, I encourage you to stick with the simplest structure you possibly can. If you have a one person setup you can using a status is perfectly fine. If you have a larger setup maybe starting to go into that subtask or that checklist or that assigned comment method, any of those could be a good choice as your team grows a little bit larger. Having a subtask for this and using some automations to make sure that everyone is aware of what stage things are at and even maybe even pairing it with a dashboard so you have high visibility from a managerial perspective that might be the appropriate thing for you when you are at that place. It all depends on the scale of your business and how many safeguards you really need. Because because we don't want to overstructure things and overcomplicate it, but we also don't want things slipping through the cracks because we didn't build the proper safeguards. So to wrap us up here, I'd like to hear how you are organizing your approvals in ClickUp. Go ahead and leave a comment below and let me know what you find to be working best. I'm sure everyone would appreciate everyone sharing their best practices. I'll be back again soon with another video talking about how you can take control of your business using ClickUp. And if you want to see more videos like that be sure to click subscribe, like leave a comment. All of those things help this video reach more people and cost you more nothing. So thank you guys so much for joining me on another video. Until next time, enjoy the process.