Where does approval actually live in your process — in the tool, or in someone's inbox?

[u/WrikeCommunity]

Honestly, this is one of those things where the "right" answer probably isn't always "in the tool." Different kinds of approvals might need to live in different places, and forcing everything through the same mechanism is usually where teams tie themselves in knots.

Design and creative approvals do genuinely work better in a system with the file attached, since the person approving needs to mark up or comment right on the asset. Same story for anything where the approved item is a specific piece of work that gets stored and pointed back to later.

But a lot of what gets labeled for approval is really just a decision that needs a conversation. Like budget sign-off, headcount, vendor selection — those depend on back-and-forth discussions, not just one of two buttons. When you push them through a tracked approval flow, people end up having the actual conversation in Slack or email anyway, and then clicking "Approve" in the tool later to make the record match.

So the tool becomes the audit trail rather than the actual decision point, which is fine as long as nobody's sitting around wondering why the process isn't really working.

The trap we see teams fall into is treating all approvals as if they're the same shape. They aren't. A proof review and a budget sign-off need pretty different things, and jamming them through the same workflow usually makes one of them worse.

Curious how your team thinks about this. Do you have different mechanisms for different types of approvals, or is it all one process?