Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Professional or higher, Employee Service Suite Growth or higher |
| Access | Agent |
An approval request asks a named person to say yes or no inside a ticket, and records the answer where anyone can find it.
What it replaces
Before approvals existed, sign-off happened in email or in a chat message, and the ticket carried a note saying "manager agreed". Six weeks later nobody could show who agreed, when, or to what.
An approval is a structured request attached to the ticket: who was asked, what they were asked, what they answered and when.
How it works
An agent creates an approval request on a ticket and names the approver, who can be a person or a group, an agent or an end user. Agents answer in the Agent Workspace and end users in the help centre. The outcome is recorded on the ticket, and the Approval status field follows it by itself. Until the approver answers or somebody withdraws the request, the ticket cannot be closed.
A light agent can be the approver too, so a paid seat is not needed for somebody whose only job here is to say yes or no. Light agents are included with your plan up to a limit and answering an approval request is one of the things they are allowed to do.
Business rules can act on the outcome, which is what makes it a workflow rather than a form. A trigger can move the ticket on when it is approved, and back to the agent when it is not.
Where it earns its place
- Refunds and credits above a threshold.
- Access requests in an internal IT desk, where a manager has to agree.
- Anything with a cost that a support agent cannot authorise alone.
- Changes with a risk attached, where somebody senior should look first.
Where it is too heavy
Approvals add a step and a waiting period. Applied to routine work they turn a five-minute answer into a two-day one, and people start working around them. Use them where the sign-off genuinely matters and someone would ask for evidence later.
Not on a standalone Support plan
Approvals are a Suite feature. On a standalone Support plan they are not available at any tier, so this is one of the cases where the answer is a Suite rather than an add-on.
Within the Suite an admin turns it on; it does not appear by itself.
Who may approve, and who may ask
On Professional, admins and agents can create approval requests without anything being configured. On Enterprise and Enterprise Plus that permission goes to admins and to any custom role created after approvals was switched on, which means roles that already existed do not get it and have to be edited.
That is the detail that makes approvals look broken on Enterprise: the feature is on, and half the team cannot use it because their role predates it.
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