Task Approval Workflow

Task approval adds a review gate to a project's tasks. It is switched on per project with the Task needs approval toggle in the project's settings. When it is on, a task that has been worked on is not treated as finished on the assignee's word alone — it sits in Waiting Approval until someone with the right access moves it to Complete.

Approval is a project-level setting, not a company-wide one, so you can run strict review on client-facing projects and leave internal projects unrestricted.

Who can use it

• Turning the toggle on/off: anyone who can create or edit the project (Admin, or a role with edit rights on Projects).
• Moving a task into Waiting Approval: anyone who can change that task's status, including its assignee. Waiting Approval can only be set on tasks that belong to a project with Task needs approval enabled.
• Approving (moving Waiting Approval → Complete): Admins and the project's own admin. Once a task has been submitted for approval, an employee who is not the project's admin no longer sees a status dropdown on that task — the status shows as plain text until an approver acts on it.
• Underneath that, status changes still follow the role's Change Status / Edit Tasks permission levels (None, Added, Owns, All) in Roles & Permissions.

Prerequisites

• A project exists. See Projects.
• Task needs approval is enabled on that project.
• At least one task exists in the project. See Tasks.
• The reviewer is an Admin or the project's admin, and their role has status-change access to tasks in that project. If they cannot change the status, check Roles & Permissions first — and have them log out and back in, because permission changes do not always apply to an already-active session.

How to Access

• Enable the toggle: /account/projects → open the project → edit it (or set it at creation from /account/projects/create) → Task needs approval.
• Review the approval queue: /account/tasks/waiting-approval — a dedicated list of every task currently sitting in Waiting Approval, with the same Project / Assignee filters as the main task list.
• Work with task statuses: /account/tasks (List, Board, Calendar, or Whiteboard view), or the Tasks / Task Board tab inside the project.
• Task Settings (default status, reminders, client visibility): Settings → Task Settings.

Turning approval on for a project

1. Go to /account/projects and open the project (or start a new one at /account/projects/create).
2. In the project form, find the visibility/approval toggles — Public Gantt Chart, Public Task Board, and Task needs approval.
3. Enable Task needs approval.
4. Save the project.

The toggle sits alongside the project's other configuration (Currency, Project Budget, Hours Estimate, "Calculate project progress through", "Allow manual time logs", "Enable Mindboard", "Send task notification to client"), so you can set it in the same pass as the rest of the project setup.

Task statuses in the approval flow

Statuses are changed from the inline Status dropdown in the task list / Task Board, or from the task itself. A task can also be closed out with the Mark As Complete button on the task.

Reviewing and approving a task

1. Open /account/tasks/waiting-approval to see the approval queue. (You can also work from /account/tasks or the project's Tasks tab and filter by the Waiting Approval status.)
2. Open the task and check the work using its detail tabs: Files, Sub Task, Comment, Timesheet, Notes, History.
3. Leave any extra review feedback in the Comment tab — @mention the assignee so they are notified. Replies containing only a file attachment are allowed, so you can attach a marked-up document without typing anything.
4. Set the status from the queue's inline Status dropdown:
   • Approved: change the status to Complete (or use Mark As Complete). This goes through immediately with no extra prompt.
   • Not approved: pick any other status (for example Incomplete or Under Review). PMSuite then opens a Task status change reason dialog with a required Reason field; what you type is saved as a comment on the task, so the rejection reason is always on record.

Moving a task out of Completed resets it to incomplete, so a task that was signed off too early can be reopened for another round without recreating it.

Effect on other features

• Task Board: Waiting Approval is one of the statuses in the inline status dropdown, so approval state is visible and changeable directly on the board. See Task Board.
• Recurring tasks: recurrence needs two things — the task's Cycles field must be populated for it to recur at all, and the next instance is generated only when the current one is marked Complete. Recurrence is completion-triggered, not time-based, so on an approval-enabled project the approver's sign-off is what releases the next cycle. See Recurring Tasks.
• Project progress: how completed tasks feed the project's progress figure depends on the project's "Calculate project progress through" setting. See Project Overview.
• Notifications: Task Completed/Updated, Task Assignment, Task Mention and task-comment events are separate notification types you can enable in Settings → Notification Settings — including the Slack tab, which pushes PMSuite notifications one-way into a Slack channel via an incoming webhook. See Slack.
• Client visibility: whether clients see a task's Status, Comment, History and other sections is controlled section-by-section in Task Settings, and the client portal respects those toggles.
• History: status changes are recorded on the task's History tab, which is your audit trail for who approved what.
• Google Calendar: if Google Calendar sync is active for the company, task records are pushed one-way from PMSuite into Google Calendar; items created in Google Calendar do not appear in PMSuite.

Limitations

• No per-task approver field. You cannot nominate a specific person to sign off an individual task; the approvers are the Admins plus the project's admin. Workaround: set the person who should review the work as that project's admin, and @mention them in a task comment when the task moves to Waiting Approval.
• Approval is per project, not per task. The toggle applies to the whole project, and Waiting Approval cannot be used at all on a project where the toggle is off — the status is rejected on save. Workaround: keep approval-required work in its own project with the toggle on; on projects where it is off, use Under Review as an informal review state instead.
• No built-in approval-cycle-time metric. Workaround: use the Task Report plus the task History tab to see when statuses changed, and set reminders in Settings → Task Settings (before / on / after due date) to chase stalled approvals.

Troubleshooting

• "Waiting Approval" is not in the status dropdown. Confirm you are looking at a task in a project where Task needs approval is enabled, then refresh the page.
• The assignee can no longer change the status. That is expected: once a task is submitted for approval, an employee who is not the project's admin sees the status as plain text instead of a dropdown. An Admin or the project admin has to move it on.
• A reviewer cannot change the status. Confirm they are an Admin or the project's admin, check their role's Change Status / Edit Tasks level (None, Added, Owns, All), then have them log out and back in — permission changes do not always apply to an active session.
• The task will not save without a project. Task Settings has an Is project required toggle. If it is set to Yes, every task must belong to a project — pick one, or set the toggle to No.
• A task was approved by mistake. Move it out of Completed; it resets to incomplete and can be reworked and re-approved.
• Nobody was notified. Task notification types are individually toggleable in Settings → Notification Settings — verify Task Completed/Updated and the task-comment event are enabled there.

Related Articles

• Tasks
• Task Board
• Task Comments
• Recurring Tasks
• Subtasks
• Projects
• Project Overview
• Task Report
• Understanding Roles