Document Workflow and Releasing
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      Edit Document Stages

      Contents

      • Overview
      • Pre-conditions
      • Steps
      • Supplementary Information
      • Notes

      Overview

      A Document Owner can:

      • set and change stages due dates in the document.
      • make a stage mandatory, assigning mandatory approver(s).

      If the document was created from/is attached to a template, it will inherit the template's stages, which each include their settings for:

      • stage deadline period*
      • optional: approvers
      • allowing editing

      Pre-conditions

      • Document Level Permission: 'Owner'.

      Steps

      Change Stage Deadline:

      1. Click File from the menubar.
      2. Click on Document settings.
      3. Select Stages tab.
      4. Click on a stage to be edited.
      5. Select another deadline on the calendar*.
      6. Click Save.

       

      Make a Document Stage Mandatory & Assign Mandatory Approver:

      1. Click File from the menubar.
      2. Click on Document settings.
      3. Select Stages tab.
      4. Click on a stage to be edited.
      5. Tick box for the Mandatory stage.
      6. Select mandatory approver(s)*.
      7. Click Save.

      Supplementary Information


      Change Stage Deadline

      If users have the Upcoming deadlines of Document Stages notification enabled, when the due date is approaching, users will receive an email notification about the upcoming deadline.

       

      Make a Document Stage Mandatory & Assign Mandatory Approver

      This functionality could be useful when, for example, all documents must be approved by a group of individuals and a user needs to ensure no document is released without approval.

      Once a stage is made as mandatory, users won’t be able to skip this stage and therefore, release any unapproved documents.

      Mandatory approver(s) will be automatically added to the document and requested to approve the document once it’s moved to the mandatory stage (e.g. Approve stage).

      Approvers can be individual users or a user group. In the latter case, any member of the group can approve on behalf of the whole group*.

      Automations

      Automations can be configured to use a stage deadline as a trigger to streamline document workflows by automatically executing an action when the deadline is reached, or a time period before or after it has been reached.

      With this in mind, it's key to be aligned with the owners of the template your document is created from to ensure that the appropriate stage deadline-based automations are configured to send email notifications to the correct stakeholders whenever specific stage deadline timings of your documents are reached.

      Notes

      • There is a difference between mandatory approvals a document inherits from the template and mandatory approvals added by the document owner.

      Approvals Inherited from a Template

      In the first case, mandatory stages and approvals are predefined by the template owner/ administrators centrally on a system level.

      Every document, created from a template, inherits those mandatory stages and approvals.

      When a document is transitioned to the mandatory stage, the mandatory approver is:

      • automatically added to the document as a Reviewer;
      • automatically assigned as a document approver.

      In this case, document owner cannot:

      • skip the mandatory stage;
      • remove mandatory approvals/approvers.

      Approval Added by the Document Owner

      If it is the document owner who marks a stage as mandatory on a document level, the mandatory approver will be:

      • automatically added to the document as Reviewer and
      • automatically assigned as a document approver.

      However, this approval will be treated as a regular stage approval.

      The owner will be able to remove such approver/approval:

      • by either deleting approval in the Approvals section on the sidebar or
      • by turning the mandatory stage back into a regular stage in the document settings.

      Stage Deadline

      • The document's stage deadline date is calculated based on:
        • the date the document was last drafted in.
        • the period of the stage.
        • the total time of all the previous stages aggregated.
      • If the document is de-attached from an old template and attached to a new template, the stage deadlines are recalculated, so the current date is used to calculate the new stage deadlines instead of the date when the document was (re)drafted with the old template.