The Approval Workflow allows you to quickly add a step of approval for every document that Form Publisher generates from a Google Form.
Enabling the Approval Workflow
To enable the Approval Workflow, you need to open Form Publisher in the Sharing options and notifications screen, enable the Approval Workflow checkbox, and click Save.
Adding the approver name and the approval status to documents
In the generated documents, you can add information about the approval process (for example, approval status, name of the approver, the approver signature). To do so, you need to edit your template and add the relevant markers.
Email notifications for approval requests
With the Approval Workflow enabled and the document template ready, whenever someone submits the Google Form, the approvers receive a notification email letting them know that they have a request to approve.
The owner of the form is the default approver of the generated documents. You can add more approvers from the Sharing options and notifications screen. For more information, see Add approvers for the Approval Workflow.
All added approvers receive approval request emails which also contain the generated document from the form submission. The first approver to approve or reject the document finalizes the approval workflow for a generated document.
Approving or rejecting a request
After an approver clicks Approve/Reject, they are redirected to a browser page where they can process the request. Approvers can add comments and approve or reject the request.
Email notifications for approved or rejected documents
After that, the form respondent as well as all approvers receive an email with the approved (or rejected) request.
In the email notification of the processed document, the approved or rejected document is available as an attachment (if the document format PDF or Microsoft Office) or as a link (for Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides). The email also includes any comments that approvers add when they process the request.
If you added the relevant markers, the processed document also contains Approval Workflow information, such as the name of the approver and the approval status.
Adding a signature field and signing documents
You can also add a signature marker to your document template so that when an approver processes the document, they also have to sign it.
In this case, to process a new request, an approver must also draw their signature.
The drawn signature is then added to the processed document.
