Contract Manager Approval
Manager approval places a human review step between a sales representative closing a deal and the company treating that deal as final. When it is turned on, a contract stays marked Unapproved until an owner, sales manager, or project manager reviews the representative's work and approves it.
It exists because the level of review a sale needs varies from company to company. Some owners want every contract checked before it moves forward. Larger companies, and those doing specialized or high-value work, often want a second set of eyes on scope and pricing. Smaller companies, or those with a small team of highly trained representatives, frequently do not need this and can leave it turned off.
Turning it on
Manager approval is a company setting. In your corporate dashboard, open General Parameters and check Contracts require manager approval.
Because it is set per company, a single organization can run manager approval on some companies and leave it off on others.
Who can approve
A user can approve contracts if they hold either of these permissions:
Has executive authority
Can management review and approve contracts
The second permission exists so that you can give a sales manager or project manager approval rights without granting them the broad access that executive authority carries.
Everyone else still sees the contract's approval status on the contract header, shown as green Contract Approved or red Contract Unapproved, but has no control to change it.
Approving a contract
The control sits on the contract header as a colored dropdown: red for Contract Unapproved, green for Contract Approved. Change the selection and the contract updates immediately.
The control appears on Retail / Service and Insurance Proceeds contracts. It does not appear on Subject To contracts, which cannot carry financials, and Warranty contracts approve themselves when they are created.
Once approved, the contract header displays the approval date.
What happens when a contract is approved
Approving a contract does the following:
• Stamps the contract with an Approval Date.
• Records the date of the project's first contract approval on the project.
• Creates the project number, if your company's job numbering is set to trigger on contract approval.
• Fires the Contract was Approved alert, so you can notify a manager, the representative, or anyone else automatically. See Alerts Overview.
• Writes a note to the project history recording who approved it and when.
• Re-evaluates the project workflow.
What manager approval does not do
Manager approval is a review checkpoint, not a lock. Approving a contract does not, by itself, prevent work from proceeding. Invoices, payments, work orders, material orders, and commission payouts all remain available on a contract that has not been approved. If you need approval to genuinely hold a project up, use the workflow condition described below.
Making approval genuinely required
To make approval a hard gate rather than a marker, add the workflow condition Contracts have been manager approved to the workflow step you want to hold.
The condition is satisfied only when every Retail / Service and Insurance Proceeds contract on the project has been approved. Until then, the workflow will not advance past that step. This is the most effective way to make manager approval mean something operationally.
The approval date
The approval date is stamped automatically when the contract is approved. Users who can approve contracts can also edit it on the contract's Details panel, which is useful when a contract was approved on an earlier date than it was entered into the system.
Unapproving a contract clears the approval date. If you unapprove and then re-approve, the contract receives today's date, so if the original approval date matters, set it back manually.
Note that the project number, once created on approval, is not removed by unapproving the contract.
Reporting on approval
Approval status and Approval Date are available as filters and columns on the Contract, Contract Type, Payments, WIP, and Profit & Loss reports, so leadership can review a vetted pipeline rather than one that still contains unreviewed sales.