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In this release, you can now:

  • Add an approval step to any inspections template to request sign off from an assigned person or group 

What you’ll love about this new functionality

Reviewing and approving an inspection is a pivotal step for many checks you complete in SafetyCulture. You can now add an approval step to any inspection template so you can have confidence that workflows are followed properly and sign offs are done correctly every time. 

With approvals for Inspections you can now:

  • Easily add and edit an approval step within any inspection using the template builder. 
  • Select an approver for a template. Approvers can be an individual, a group, or dynamically selected based on site and group membership.
  • Request approvals during the inspection process to ensure proper sign off by the assigned person or group.
  • Receive notifications when an inspection has been sent to you for approval. 
  • Filter and sort inspections based on the approval status and approver. 
  • View approval data such as the status and approver name in the inspection details. 

How to get started with the new release

Approvals for Inspections is available to premium & enterprise SafetyCulture customers. You can add approvals to any new or existing template using the template builder.

To learn more about approvals for inspections in SafetyCulture, read our support articles here.

For any additional support, contact our Support Team or your dedicated Customer Success Manager.

Hi.

This is an awesome product update that allows us to bring yet another process inside the Safety Culture platform. 

On the “Inspections” menu you can filter between status’ of “In progress/Pending Approval/Complete”, however, when setting up an inspection status report in Analytics, you only have the options of “Incomplete/Complete/Archived”. It would be great if the option “Pending Approval” could be added to the inspection status options inside Analytics as well. 

 

Cheers


Hey @Joey_886  – thanks for sharing your feedback! I completely agree that adding more filtering options in Analytics would be really beneficial, and I’m sure other members of the Community would feel the same. We’d love for you to submit this as a seperate idea, so others can vote and share their thoughts to see how this feature could help them too. Plus, our Product team keeps a close eye on those ideas to help with prioritising future updates! 🙂


Is the approval data available through the API at this time? Or will this be available in the future?


Hey @dataadminpjs

We currently have no api support for approvals at the moment. Can I ask what you would be looking to use the API for?

Ryan


Hello @Ryan Clement,

We currently have a “Reviewed by” section in our Inspections that has the exact same structure as approvals, but without the added functionality. We use this data in multiple ways, but we mainly use this data in our internal “Completed Inspection” automation, which leverages your webhooks. We set the “Reply to” values in those automated emails to be based on the “Reviewed by” person. We also communicate that information in an inspection summary within that same persons name so that field employees and managers can communicate with the appropriate parties if there are issues.

We discussed migrating from the “Review by” to the new “Approval” section, but if it cannot be support by our existing process, we would have to wait until the data is available. This is obviously a small use case, but we want to maintain our existing automation and data tracking structures, which all use the APIs.
 


Is it possible to re-request approval on an inspection?

 

For example, we are using it to create a document which is formally issued externally so required sign off by our management. 

There are cases where the inspection will be edited/added to and re-issued. 

 

Currently we are able to edit the inspection, but not re-send any approval requests. 

 

Thanks

Lily


I have just stumbled on this one. This would be a perfect solution to a problem we are facing. 

We were issuing permits to work to contractors by sharing the permit templates externally. They complete the permit and were clicking on submit which would trigger an instant notification to us. We would go into the permit and approve or reject it.

A few months ago, the notification's from external users stopped. SC have spent some time looking into it but are unable to find a fix.

Adding an approval in would solve it for us. But we would need to be able to add it into the template at the submission stage and not the end of the template.

Is this possible? 

 


The Approval feature looks promising, but I can’t work out how to dynamically assign an approver.

I can see how to set either a particular user or a group, but not how to dynamically assign.

The other thing I would like to be able to do is to restrict the approval assignment to another user in the same group as the inspector.