Bulk Review Requests (Bulk Approvals)

Modified on Wed, 8 Oct at 5:44 PM

The Bulk Review Request feature allows Reviewers to respond to selected requests in Bulk.

This article will take you through the below items. Click to jump ahead to that section:

Enable Bulk Approvals for a Workflow

Admin users can Enable Bulk Reviewing at a Template level for a Workflow for new and edited existing below Workflows Types:

The Enable Bulk Reviewing setting can be located at the bottom of those Add Workflow or Edit Workflow pages. It will be auto-enabled for new Workflows of these Types (but can be disabled).

Enable Bulk Review.png

When enabled and saved, this feature will apply on whatever folder(s) (for Resource Workflows) or Multi Upload Fields in Databases (for Record File Approvals) that this Workflow has been configured against.

Enable Cross-Workflow Bulk Reviewing

The support for Bulk Reviewing can also be extended across different Workflows. The setting Allow Cross-Workflow Bulk Reviewing can be found in Admin > Settings to enable this option.

If enabled, this means requests from any Workflow Template that also has Enable Bulk Reviewing enabled can be reviewed together in bulk.

If you want to restrict users to only being able to Bulk Review items from the same Workflow, then ensure Allow Cross-Workflow Bulk Reviewing is disabled, and control on a Workflow-by-Workflow level within each Workflow Template settings.

Select requests to Review in Bulk

When enabled, if relevant Requests exist against a Template and a user is a Reviewer or Admin user, then Review Request(s) can be selected as the action in the bulk actions menu (as shown below).

Up to 300 requests can be selected to Review together in bulk.

Bulk Footer.png

Restrictions on what can be selected together

Only Pending requests can be selected for Bulk Review.
Users have to be Reviewers (or have Admin permission to Workflow module) to be able to select Pending requests to review in bulk.
For staged requests, this always applies to the same current pending stage of the request, for example:
- Stage 2 requests may be selected together, but not a mix of Stage 1 and Stage 2
- Note that non-stage requests can be selected with Stage 1 requests (in Cross Workflow scenarios)
Note that if you need to update your response you will need to do so individually.
Record and Survey requests are not supported for Bulk Reviewing.

Bulk Review Page

Bulk Review Page.png

The Bulk Review page is split into two main sections; Requests and Responses.

Requests

On the left of this page you can view all items you have selected to review in bulk. You can do a number of actions within this space:

Search for specific request names
Select specific requests via checkboxes to apply response information to in bulk or batches
Open individual requests if you wish to check each in more detail and review them individually
Perform key actions like Download, Re-assign and Cancel
View key information about each request (such as remaining Reviewers)
Filter by request status (for example: you may just want to see all remaining requests from your original selection.)

Responses

The right side of the page allows Reviewers to Apply the below in bulk to selected items:

Input Comments
Add an Approval decision, ie Approved or Declined (if applicable)
Add an Approved Until date (if applicable)
Admin users can also Complete the Stage or the Request

Reviewers should Click Apply to Selected to add those details to the selected requests.

Submitting your Response

Once you have added in the needed responses, either in bulk or individually, click Submit & Continue, or Submit & Next (for individual responses). Your Bulk Review page will automatically update to reflect the changes (ie, statuses may change from Pending to approved/declined based on your response).

Note that for Staged requests, if your response escalates a request to the next stage, and you are also a reviewer on that stage (or an Admin user), you can continue to review that next stage without having to re-select those items from the Approvals List.

When you are finished adding responses, you can close the page to return to the Approvals List.

You can view a full walkthrough of those options below:

Bulk Review Walkthrough.gif

Reporting & Compliance

While Bulk Reviewing makes things quicker and easier for Reviewers to respond to multiple items, we understand it may not always be your best practice for this to occur. Tracking is in place to note if users are reviewing one-by-one (either from the Approvals List, or one-by-one from the Bulk Review page) or in Bulk.

This information is available in:

In Workflow History - a Bulk Review column notes which responses were made in single or bulk.
In Review Request Response section - responses will indicate if they were made in single review, or via bulk review actions:
In Stats Reporting:
- For Workflow Response reports, the 'Bulk Review' column shows how responses were made ('Yes' if in Bulk, 'No' if Single, 'N/A' for unsupported record / survey requests.)
  - 'Bulk Review' can also be used as a filtering condition to view results that have all been made in Bulk, or not.
- Likewise for Workflow Response reports, a 'Bulk Response UUID' column surfaces a unique ID that can then be used as a condition to see what other requests were made at the same time by the same user.

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* Please note that some of the terms used above such as Workflows & Approvals are customisable and may appear differently in your platform.

Grouped Approval Requests