Managing document approvals across your tools

Most teams don’t approve documents in one place. In our survey of 450 people who handle approvals at work, 61% work across more than one tool for the content that needs sign-off. The documents live in Microsoft 365, Google Docs, Confluence, Canva and Dropbox, and the approval has to happen wherever the document is.

That spread drives the most common complaint people gave us. More than half, 54%, said their biggest approval problem is feedback and sign-off scattered across email, chat and comments. Even as the tools add approval features of their own, about half of all approvals still happen over email, and only about one in ten teams uses a dedicated approval tool.

If everything lives in Confluence

Some teams have standardised on Confluence for their documentation. If that’s you, you’re in good shape. Confluence now has a native approval feature on its Premium and Enterprise plans, and Approvals for Confluence adds section-level approvals, works on every plan, and is used for ISO and SOC 2 documentation. For a single-tool Confluence setup, that covers most of what you need.

But most teams use more than one tool

Most teams aren’t single-tool, and by now every major tool is building approvals of its own. Word has an add-in that lets you request and respond to sign-off inside the document. Google Drive has had formal approvals on Docs and files since 2021. Confluence just joined them. Each one works well enough on its own.

The catch is that each is tied to its own set of tools and works its own way. Microsoft’s runs through Teams. Google’s stays inside Google Workspace. Confluence’s lives in Confluence. None of them reaches across to the others.

When we asked which single tool people would most want to improve approvals in, Microsoft 365 came first by a wide margin and Google Docs second. But most people don’t work in just one. A launch doc gets approved in Google Docs, an SOP in Word, a page in Confluence, each through a different system with its own status and its own record.

Why more approval tools don’t fix the problem

More approval features, one per tool, sounds like progress. It doesn’t help the person chasing sign-off across all of them. You learn a different flow in every app. Status lives in whichever tool the document sits in, so there’s no single view of what’s waiting on whom. And the record of who approved which version is split across systems that were never built to talk to each other.

That last part hurts most where the stakes are highest. About half the people we surveyed need a formal record of who approved what for audits or standards like ISO and SOC 2. Every tool can approve its own documents now. What no single tool gives you is one approval experience, and one record, across all of them.

One approval experience, wherever the document lives

That’s the problem we’re building OneApproval to fix. Instead of a different approval system in every tool, you get one that works across Microsoft Word, Google Docs and Confluence, with the same clear status and the same record no matter where the document sits. Here’s how it works.

We’re building it now with a small group of design partners. If approvals across tools are a daily headache for your team, come and help shape it.