Bulk Review Requests (Bulk Approvals)

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
  • Enable Cross-Workflow Bulk Reviewing 
• Select requests to review in Bulk
  • Restrictions on what can be selected together
• Bulk Review Page
• Reporting & Compliance 

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:

• Resource Publish Workflows
• Resource Feedback Workflows
• Resource Download Workflows
• Record File Approval Workflows

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).

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. 

When enabled in an existing template, the ability to Bulk Review will apply for both existing Pending requests, as well as new ones made after the change (as long as the listed restrictions below do not apply). If the setting is disabled, it will also be disabled for existing and new pending requests tied to this Template. 

As long as this setting is enabled for one Workflow Template, the checkbox column will display in the Approvals List page for users to select requests.  

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 selected to be reviewed together in bulk (by users who are Reviewers on those requests, or Admins.) 

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 where Enable Bulk Reviewing is set, and a user is a Reviewer or Admin user, then a request may be selected to Bulk Review from the Approvals List.

Once one item is selected, only others that have been configured to be allowed to be Reviewed together (see sections above), and where the below restrictions do not apply to, can be selected to review at the same time.

Items that do not meet the requirements to review together will be disabled with the below hover:

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

Click the 'Review Request(s)' action (pictured below) in the Bulk Actions footer to open the Bulk Review Page. 

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

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:

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. To help monitor how your users are using this feature, 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 to see 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. 

---

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

Related:

Navigating your Approval Request List 

Grouped Approval Requests