Multi-stage approval chains with a full audit trail

Some work is not finished when it's done, it's finished when somebody with authority says so. In most teams that step exists but lives nowhere: a message in a group chat, a verbal nod at handover, an email that gets buried. The work was approved, but six months later nobody can prove it, and nobody can say by whom.

EasyBee models sign-off explicitly, as a stage the work passes through rather than an event that happens somewhere else.

Stages, in order, with names

Build a chain of named stages — Manager, then Compliance, then Head Office. Each stage has its own reviewers, and work only advances when the current stage approves.

Naming the stages matters in practice. "Awaiting approval" tells a submitter nothing; "Waiting on Compliance" tells them who to chase and roughly how long it usually takes. It also means the chain documents your actual governance process instead of flattening it into a single yes/no.

Chains can be as short or long as the process genuinely is. A daily cleaning log might need one stage. A monthly food-safety audit might need three.

Rejection reopens the work

A rejection doesn't archive the task. It reopens it with the reason attached and notifies whoever submitted it, so the loop closes where the work happens rather than in somebody's inbox.

This is deliberately different from a status field. A task marked "rejected" and left alone is a dead end that someone has to notice. A task that reopens is back in the assignee's list with the reviewer's explanation attached to it, and it stays there until it is resubmitted.

Who can approve

Approval rights are a permission, not a list of names. They follow roles, so when a supervisor is promoted, someone covers a shift, or a site changes manager, the chain keeps working without anyone editing it.

Roles themselves are editable, and permissions can be tuned per role, so "shift leads may approve cleaning logs but not safety audits" is a setting, not a convention people are expected to remember.

The pending-approvals inbox

Reviewers get a single filtered list of everything waiting on them specifically, not a shared queue they have to search through for their own items. The sidebar carries the outstanding count, so approvals stop being the thing that gets forgotten because nothing surfaced them.

Submitters see the state of their own submissions without having to ask.

Actions that fire on approval

Approval can trigger the next thing, not merely close the current one. A signed-off audit can raise the corrective tasks it generated, notify a role, or release the next stage of a routine. So the process moves without a human remembering to move it.

The audit trail

Every submission, approval, rejection and reason is recorded with a timestamp and an identity.

When an inspector asks who signed off a procedure in February, the answer is a lookup, not a trawl through message history. Combined with the evidence captured in checklists. Photos, readings, per-step timestamps: the record shows not only that the work was approved but what was approved and on what basis. That combination is what compliance evidence is about.

Chain shapes that come up in practice

Where approvals fit

Approvals normally sit at the end of a checklist run on a recurring schedule. They are most valuable wherever the cost of an unverified claim is high: statutory checks, food safety, clinical governance, or any routine you would rather not defend from memory.