The Greenlight Approvals manual

1 · Getting started

Install it, get a board, then decide how approvals should start. There are two standard ways to run them — and most teams end up using both.

1. Open the monday.com marketplace, search Greenlight Approvals, and click Install.
2. On first use monday asks you to authorize the app. This lets Greenlight read approvers and write decisions back to your boards — nothing else.
3. Get yourself a board to approve things on (see below).
4. Turn on the automation (§2), send a request from an item (§3), or set up both.

Two ways to run approvals

They answer different questions. The automation handles approvals that should happen every time your process reaches a certain point. The Request button handles a person asking for something specific and explaining why.

Getting a board — three ways

2 · The approval automation

Approvals that fire from your process. An item's status changes to Pending, the request goes out by itself, and nobody has to remember. This is what most teams set up, and it's what writes decisions back into your board's columns.

1. On your board, open Automate → Create automation.
2. Choose the trigger “When status changes to…” and pick your status column and label (e.g. Pending).
3. As the action, choose Request Approval from Greenlight Approvals.
4. Map the fields: Approver → your People column, plus — and this is the part that matters — your status, Approved By and Approved At columns, so decisions get written back.
5. Save. Every item that hits the trigger now starts an approval chain by itself.

Add it once per board and the approval step stops depending on anyone noticing. It's the right choice whenever the approval is part of how the work moves — a purchase request reaching Pending, a contract reaching Ready for review, a design reaching Needs sign-off.

A live recipe: “When Approval changes to Pending, request approval from Approver or Approver email (external)…”

3 · The Request button

For when a person needs to ask for something specific and explain why. Open the item, write what you need, attach the invoice, send. A status flip can't carry any of that — it has no author and no context — which is why this path exists alongside the automation, not instead of it.

It also happens to need no setup at all, so it's the fastest way to try the product on the day you install it.

Where to find it

• Open any item → the Approval Panel item view → the Request tab. First time on a board: click + in the item card's tab row → Explore more views → Installed Apps → add Approval Panel.
• Or use the Request approval entry in a board item's menu, which opens the same dialog.

The request dialog: a required message, an optional attachment, who approves it, and the item's own columns riding along underneath.

The message — required

Every request needs a message, between 1 and 2,000 characters. That is deliberate: an approver who gets a bare “please approve” has to go dig for context, and that's where days disappear. The dialog tells you what the approver will see: “Approvers see this as plain text. Links are not clickable.” — URLs in your message are never turned into clickable links, which is what stops the request email being used as a phishing vehicle.

The attachment — optional

• One file per request, up to 10 MB.
• Accepted types: pdf, png, jpg, jpeg, gif, webp, docx, xlsx, pptx, txt, csv. Legacy .doc/.xls/.ppt and archives such as .zip are rejected on purpose.
• The file is stored on the item's own Files column, in your monday account — it counts toward your monday storage, not ours. If the board has more than one Files column you pick which; if it has none, the dialog offers a Create a Files column button.
• The upload is never allowed to sink the request. If monday rejects the file, the approval still goes out and you're told the file didn't make it.

Context columns — chosen for you

Under Sent with this request the dialog shows what the approver will see alongside your message. You don't pick these and there is no checkbox to hide one — Greenlight takes the item's first 8 columns that actually have a value, in the board's own column order, and sends those.

Column types that can't produce a useful line are skipped automatically: files, subtasks, buttons, docs, progress, dependencies, mirror columns, formula columns, and the created/last-updated stamps.

Who approves it

When a rule decides instead of you

If a routing rule matches the item, the dialog says so. There are two flavours (§9 explains how to write them):

• Advisory — a banner reading “Rule ‘…’ suggests this chain — your choice below overrides it.” The picker stays fully editable and is pre-filled with the rule's template.
• Enforced — the picker is replaced by a read-only panel naming the rule and listing every approver in order. You cannot change it, and the server re-checks on send, so there is no way around it from the dialog.

An enforced rule in the dialog: the rule is named, the chain is listed, and the requester can't reroute it. Your message and attachment are still yours.

4 · What the approver gets

A clean email with one neutral Review request button — the approve/reject choice is always made on the decision page, with the full request in view, never blind from the inbox. It works for monday users and for people outside your company entirely — a client, a supplier, your accountant. Their decision is written straight back to your board.

The request email: the AI brief with its anomaly flags up top, then your message with its attribution line, the item's context columns, the attachment, and one link to review and decide.

• Subject: Approval requested: <item name>.
• The AI brief sits at the top — two or three plain-English sentences plus up to three anomaly flags. The next subsection covers what it reads and why you should still read the request yourself.
• Your message appears with an attribution line saying who sent it — approvers always know whose request they're answering.
• The context columns render as a small table underneath.
• The attachment is a button: Attachment: <filename>. Each approver gets their own signed link, and it expires with the decision link.
• If a rule routed the request, the email says so — e.g. “Routed by the enforced account rule ‘Purchases over 5,000’ → Finance → CFO”.
• The Review request button opens the decision page. The link is cryptographically signed, the decision is single-use (first click wins), and it expires after 7 days.

The AI brief — and why you should still read the request

Every request also carries a short AI brief: two or three plain-English sentences covering what's being asked, by whom, and the key facts. It's generated once, when the chain is created — chains started before the feature existed simply don't have one — and it appears at the top of the request email above, on the decision page (§5), and in the portal's Inbox and Queue expanders (§10). Where it helps, the brief adds up to three anomaly flags — e.g. that the amount is unusual for this item's history, or that the request looks like a near-duplicate of an earlier one.

The brief reads the same context columns you see, the requester's message, and the text of the attachment — which is how the approver learns “the attached quote totals €14,200 excl. VAT” without opening the file. Text is extracted from pdf, docx, xlsx, pptx, txt and csv attachments. There is no OCR, so images (png, jpg and friends) are not read.

Getting the attachment

Attachment links are per-recipient and entitlement-checked: the current approver, anyone who has already decided, and the requester can open the file. An approver two stages down the chain cannot — not until their stage opens. After the chain is decided, existing links keep working for a short grace period and then stop. Files are always served as a download, never rendered in the browser.

The completion email

When the chain reaches its end — final approval, or a rejection at any stage — the requester gets an email telling them how it went. Subject: Approved: <item name> or Rejected: <item name>. It's sent once, and only for requests raised through the request dialog.

The completion email: the outcome, who decided it, their comment, and the whole chain stage by stage.

5 · The decision page & feedback comments

The Review request link opens a small page — no login required. It shows the full request, and approvers can leave an optional comment that becomes part of the audit trail.

1. The page shows the whole request: item and board, who asked, the AI brief, their message, the context columns and the attachment.
2. Type a comment (optional, up to 4,000 characters) — perfect for reject reasons or conditions.
3. Click Approve or Reject. The board updates within seconds.

The decision page: the AI brief first, then the full request — message, context, attachment — then a comment box and the two buttons.

6 · Deciding without the email

The email link is for people who don't live in monday. If you do, there are three faster routes — all of them landing on exactly the same decision path, with the same audit entry.

7 · Sequential chains

Need manager → finance → exec? Put multiple people in the approver field — Greenlight runs them as stages, in order, fully automatically.

1. Stage 1's approver gets the decision email immediately.
2. When they approve, stage 2's approver is notified automatically. No one is spammed early.
3. When the last stage approves, the chain completes and the audit trail closes out.
4. A rejection at any stage stops the chain immediately and marks the item rejected.

8 · Parallel approvals & quorum

Sometimes a decision belongs to a group. A parallel stage notifies everyone at once and completes when your rule is met.

Each approver gets their own signed link — first click per person, and the chain advances the moment the quorum is met.

A parallel stage's decision page shows the group and how many have voted.

9 · Routing rules

Stop deciding who approves things. Write the policy down once — “anything over 5,000 goes to the CFO” — and let the item's own column values pick the chain.

Chains vs rules — two pieces, and you need both

The rules screen, top to bottom: the approval chains rules can route to, Test routing, the Describe your rule AI box, then this board's rules and the account-wide rules — each a set of conditions and the chain it routes to.

Writing a rule

1. Give it a name — up to 80 characters. This is what shows up in the request dialog and the audit trail, so name it like a policy: “Purchases over 5,000”.
2. Add conditions. Each one is a column, a test, and a value. Up to 10 per rule.
3. Choose Match: all conditions (AND) or any condition (OR). It's one setting for the whole rule — you can't mix AND and OR inside a single rule, and there are no nested groups. If you need that, write two rules and order them.
4. Pick the chain template under Route to. Routing to a template is the only thing a rule does — it doesn't send notifications or set fields.
5. Leave Enabled on, decide whether it's Enforced, and press Save.

Describe your rule in plain English

Don't want to assemble conditions by hand? The Rules tab has a “Describe your rule in plain English” box (account admins, in the board context). Type the policy the way you'd say it — “Anything over 10,000 goes to the finance chain and can't be overridden” — and press Generate draft. The rule builder opens pre-filled with the conditions, the route and the enforced flag, ready for your review. Nothing is saved until you press the normal Save button: the AI drafts, you commit.

After Generate draft: the box states its reading — “The AI read that as: Anything over 10,000 routes to the finance chain as an enforced rule — requesters cannot override it” — and the draft lands in the rule list badged AI draft — review before saving. It only becomes real when you press Save.

Which columns, and which tests

Rules read number, status, dropdown and text columns. The available tests change with the column type — the dropdown only ever offers you tests that make sense:

Text comparison is trimmed and case-insensitive, and contains is a plain substring test — never a regular expression. Number columns compare numerically; a number column holding something non-numeric simply never matches.

Board rules vs account-wide rules

Rules live in two places, and both are edited on the same screen:

• This board — rules that only apply to the board you're looking at.
• Account-wide — rules that apply to every board in the account.

Evaluation runs board rules first, then account-wide rules, and the first match wins — evaluation stops there. So a board rule naturally overrides an account-wide one just by existing.

Two board-level switches control the interaction:

Within a scope, rules run top to bottom. Reorder them with the ▲ / ▼ buttons on each rule — there's no drag-and-drop. One rule per scope can be marked Use as default; it's always evaluated last in its scope, whatever position it's sitting in.

Enforced vs advisory

The full order of precedence at send time is: enforced rule → the requester's explicit choice → an advisory rule → the automation recipe's mapping.

Test routing — check before you trust

At the top of the rules screen is Test routing. Give it the numeric id of a real item on the board and press Test. It reads that item's actual column values and tells you exactly what would happen. It “creates nothing, sends nothing, counts nothing” — no chain, no email, no usage counted against your plan.

A Test routing verdict: the winning rule, every condition with the item's actual value beside the expected one, and the chain it resolves to.

• The verdict names the winning rule, its scope, and whether it's enforced or advisory.
• The table shows each condition: the test, the expected value, the actual value read off the item, and whether it matched. This is how you debug a rule that “should have fired”.
• Underneath: the template, the number of stages, and every approver in order.
• Tick Requester picked their own approvers to see whether an enforced rule would still win — it will, and that's the point.
• You can also test your unsaved edits before committing them, using the Rules to use dropdown.
• If nothing matches you get “No rule matched”, and it tells you what would route the request instead.

Where to edit rules

Same builder, three doors:

• The Rules tab of the My Approval Queue board view.
• The Approval Rules account-settings view inside monday.
• The Rules tab in the portal, which starts with a board picker.

10 · The Greenlight Portal

A web app for approvers at app.greenlight-approvals.com/portal/. Sign in with monday, and get your whole approval life on one page — including approvals living in other people's monday accounts.

Signing in

Click Continue with monday.com. Greenlight reads your name, email and account so it can show you the right queue — and nothing else. It does not store a personal API token. Your session lasts up to 30 days and expires after a week of not using it.

The Inbox — the one nobody else has

The Inbox: “Every approval waiting on you, across every monday account you approve for.” View opens the full request — message, context, attachment — with the decision buttons inside, same shape as the email.

If you approve things for more than one monday account — an agency with client workspaces, a fractional CFO, a consultant on three retainers — every other approvals tool makes you log into each account separately. The Inbox doesn't. It matches on your verified email address and gathers pending approvals from every account that has one waiting for you.

Press View and a row expands in place: the AI brief with its anomaly flags first (§4), then the request details, a comment box and the decision buttons. Requests started by the automation say so — “No message — this request was started by the automation” — because a status flip has no author. Rows in the Queue tab expand the same way.

An Inbox row expanded: the AI brief and its flags sit on top of the request, so you get the gist before you decide.

The rest of the tabs

The portal's Aging tab: the shape of your backlog at a glance.

The Onboarding checklist

Onboarding: five steps that tick themselves off as you actually do them.

1. Create your approvals board — with the button right there. Admins only.
2. Send your first approval request — using the Request button, so there's nothing to set up before you can try it.
3. Decide it — from the email, the Queue tab, or the board.
4. Set routing rules — marked optional.
5. Make it automatic — put the automation on your board. Marked optional, and it never ticks itself.

On a phone

The portal on a phone — approve from anywhere, no monday app needed.

11 · The Approval Panel (item view)

Every item carries its full approval story: chains, stages, who's waiting, decisions and comments — right in the item card. It's also where the Request tab lives.

1. Open any item → click + in the item card's tab bar → Explore more views.
2. Choose Installed Apps → Approval Panel → Add to item.

The Approval Panel: pending chains with the current stage highlighted, decided chains with full history.

12 · My Approval Queue (board view)

One place for everything waiting on you — across all boards in this account — and you can decide right there, without leaving monday.

1. On any board, click + next to the board's views → Apps → Installed → My Approval Queue.
2. The table lists pending items assigned to you, with waiting-time badges, the current stage, and when the request went out.
3. Hit Approve or Reject in the row's Decision column — one click, no context switch.
4. Click the item name to open it in monday, or Open aging report ↗ to see every pending approval in the account (§16).
5. The Rules tab next to the queue is the routing-rules builder (§9).

My Approval Queue: waiting-time badges that turn red as items age, plus Approve / Reject buttons on every row.

13 · Approver templates

A template is a named, ordered set of approvers — “Finance → CFO”. Save it once and reuse it everywhere: in the request dialog, in a routing rule, or in the automation recipe.

1. Create one on the Rules screen (§9): the Approval chains card at the top has a New chain button, with Edit and Delete on each chain. Account admins only, same as rules. The API works too: POST /api/templates with a name and an ordered list of approvers.
2. It then appears in the request dialog's Approval template picker and in every rule's Route to dropdown.
3. Stage order in the template is the approval order.

14 · Reminders & escalation

Approvals that go quiet get a nudge — automatically. Nobody has to remember to chase.

The idle clock is reset by every decision, so an active chain is never chased. A run that escalates doesn't also remind.

Need to chase someone now? The aging dashboard has a Remind now button on every row (§16). Press it twice inside the cooldown and the second press is refused rather than sending a second email.

15 · Row lock after approval

Once an item is approved, it shouldn't silently change. Greenlight snapshots the item at approval and reverts later edits automatically.

1. At final approval, all of the item's column values are snapshotted.
2. Add a second recipe: “When any column changes” → Check approval lock.
3. Any edit to an approved item is reverted within seconds, with an audit note explaining why.

The audit trail tells the story: approved (with comment), then “Edit reverted — this item is approval-locked.”

16 · Approval aging dashboard

Every pending approval in your account on one screen, bucketed by how long it's been waiting — chase the red ones first.

Open it from the Open aging report ↗ link at the top of My Approval Queue (§12).

The aging dashboard: coloured bucket counters, filters, sortable columns, and a Remind now button per row.

• Bucket counters — four cards counting <24h, 24–48h, 48–72h and 72h+, coloured green → yellow → amber → red so the backlog's shape is obvious at a glance.
• Filters — narrow by waiting on (approver) and by board. The row counter shows “N of M pending”.
• Sortable columns — click Item, Waiting on or Waiting to sort; clicking the active column flips the direction. Longest-waiting first is the default.
• Clickable items — each item name links straight to that item on its monday board.
• Remind now — one button per row re-sends the decision email to whoever the chain is blocked on, right now.

17 · The audit trail & what gets written back

Every request, decision, comment and lock action is written to the item's own update feed — in monday, not in a third-party database you can't see.

The item's update feed IS the audit log: who was asked, who decided, when, and what they said.

Entries are prefixed [Greenlight] and read like a log:

• “Approval requested (2 stage(s)). Stage 1 sent to Ada Lovelace. Routed by enforced rule ‘Purchases over 5,000’ (account) → template ‘Finance → CFO’. Message: …”
• “Stage 1 approved by Ada Lovelace. Comment: ‘Fine by me.’ Stage 2 sent to Grace Hopper.”
• “REJECTED at stage 1 by Jane. Comment: ‘Budget too high for Q3’”
• “APPROVED. Final stage approved by Grace Hopper. Chain complete (2 stage(s)).”

Columns: what gets written, and when

18 · Plans & limits

Volume is the only thing that differs between plans. Every feature in this guide is on every plan, including Free — the AI brief and plain-English rule drafting included. The Free plan caps AI calls at 100 per month; paid plans are effectively unlimited.

The counter resets on the first of each month. If you hit it, the request dialog tells you before you type — you'll see “Monthly approval limit reached” or, on Free, “Another board is using this month's free allowance”. Approvals already in flight are never interrupted by a cap.

Other limits worth knowing

See pricing for the full comparison.

Still stuck?

Check the Q&A or send us a message via the contact form — a human answers.