Fixed approvers

Mandatory pre- and post-flow approvers per document type — the roles that must always sign off, captured automatically every time.

Some approval signatures can never be optional. The Quality Manager must sign every SOP; the Medical Director must sign every clinical procedure; the Legal Counsel must review every customer-facing policy. Relying on document authors to remember who must always be included is a failure waiting to happen. Fixed approvers encode those requirements at the document-type level — the Quality Manager is automatically a pre-flow approver on every SOP, whether the author remembers or not.

Stage 2 · Approve Business: Set at onboarding Enterprise: Self-service Premium: Self-service Diamond: Self-service

✓

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At a glance

What you get

Fixed approvers convert organizational policy ("Quality must sign every SOP") into enforceable workflow. Four properties make the feature defensible rather than decorative.

Pre-set per document type

Configured once — every SOP picks up the Quality Manager, every clinical procedure picks up the Medical Director.

Cannot be removed by authors

Authors can add variable approvers but can't delete fixed ones — the policy is system-enforced.

Pre- and post-flow positions

Fixed approvers can be placed at the start (e.g. Author) or end (e.g. Director) of the flow.

Named roles, not pools

Each fixed position points to a specific Entra identity or defined role — not a distribution list.

How it works

From policy to enforced signature

Fixed-approver configuration happens once per document type, during implementation. After that, every new approval flow of that type automatically includes the fixed approvers — the author picks the variable middle approvers, but the mandatory ones are pre-populated and cannot be removed.

Define fixed approvers per document type

During implementation: SOPs get Quality as pre-approver; clinical procedures get Medical Director as post-approver.

Author launches an approval

The fixed approvers are pre-populated in the flow; the author only picks the variable middle approvers.

Flow executes with fixed positions intact

Each approver signs in sequence; the fixed roles cannot be skipped or bypassed.

Evidence is captured automatically

The audit log names every signer — including the fixed approvers — with their role and the version.

Before / after

What changes when this is on

The failure modes that fixed approvers prevent are the ones regulated organizations fear most: the skipped mandatory signature, the policy change that didn't go through legal, the clinical procedure that bypassed the medical director. All of them become structurally impossible.

Without it

With intranet.ai

✗ Author forgets to include Quality in an SOP approval; the document publishes without the mandatory signature

✓ Quality is automatically a pre-flow approver on every SOP; skipping is structurally impossible

✗ New authors don't know which signatures their document type requires; flows are incomplete

✓ The required signatures are baked in; the author only picks the optional middle reviewers

✗ Policy change requires notifying every author to update their approval-flow template

✓ Update the fixed-approver config once; every new flow inherits the change automatically

✗ Audit finds that 8% of historical approvals skipped a mandatory signatory

✓ Audit finds zero skipped mandatory signatories because the system refused to let them skip

Availability

Plan availability

Fixed-approver configuration is included on every DMS plan. On **Business** the configuration is done during onboarding and changes are quoted; on **Enterprise** and above, customers can manage the configuration themselves as their org chart evolves.

business

enterprise

premium

diamond

✓ Set at onboarding

✓ Self-service

All plans include fixed approvers. On Business they are configured during onboarding and changes go through support; Enterprise, Premium, and Diamond include a self-service admin console for updating the configuration as your org evolves.

Keep exploring

Related features

Fixed approvers extend sequential approval with mandatory positions, and the resulting signatures feed the audit log and the DocuSign integration. These three pages are the rest of the approve-stage picture.

Stage 2 · Approve

Sequential approval

Named approvers, in defined order, with role-based routing — every step logged, every version tied to the approvals that produced it.

Stage 2 · Approve

DocuSign e-signature integration

PAdES signatures — simple and advanced — cryptographically bound to the approved PDF, inside the same approval flow.

Stage 4 · Govern

Audit log

Every action, every approval, every version — captured against a named user, accessible in 30 seconds.

Deep dive

Read the full narrative

For the buyer who wants the full detail — compliance context, edge cases, adjacent workflows.

Critical sign-offs that never get forgotten.

Every organization has documents where a specific person always needs to sign off. The Quality Manager on every SOP. The IT Director on every security policy. The CFO on every contract above a threshold. The Chief Medical Officer on every clinical procedure. These are the sign-offs that — if missed — become audit findings, compliance gaps, or material control failures.

Remembering to add those approvers to every single approval flow is how that discipline fails. Enforcing them at the document-type level is how it holds.

How fixed approvers work

Each document type can have fixed approvers defined:

Pre-flow approvers. Inserted at the start of every approval chain for that document type. Good for reviewers whose sign-off is a prerequisite to others (e.g., technical reviewer before executive approval).
Post-flow approvers. Inserted at the end of every approval chain. Good for final quality gatekeepers (e.g., Quality Manager as the last approver on all SOPs, or Legal as the final approver on all corporate policies).

When an author launches an approval flow on a document of that type, the fixed approvers are inserted automatically. The author sees them in the approver list but cannot remove them. Between the fixed pre- and post-flow approvers, the author adds whichever named reviewers the specific document needs.

Example configuration

Document type: SOP (Quality)

Pre-flow: none
Author’s chosen reviewers: Operations Lead, Production Manager
Post-flow: Quality Manager

Document type: Information Security Policy

Pre-flow: CISO
Author’s chosen reviewers: Security Architect, Compliance Officer
Post-flow: CEO

Document type: Customer Contract (above €100K)

Pre-flow: Legal Counsel
Author’s chosen reviewers: Deal Team, Finance
Post-flow: CFO

The author configures a flow by name and context; the system enforces the chain.

Hidden from the author’s decision, visible in the audit log

Fixed approvers don’t need to be reselected every time. The author just launches the flow; the system takes care of the default enforcement. Every approval event — including the fixed approvers’ sign-offs — is captured in the audit log with the same detail as any other approval: named user, timestamp, role, version, comments.

What this feature prevents

Forgotten sign-offs. The audit finding that says “SOP X was published without Quality Manager approval” — impossible, because the system inserts the Quality Manager automatically.
Inconsistent approval chains. SOPs approved by different people on different days with different rigor — the fixed-approver pattern makes the approval chain uniform.
Human-memory-as-process risk. Quality Manager was on vacation, didn’t get added, nobody noticed. With fixed approvers, the system routes to them regardless.

Relationship to organizational delegation

Fixed approvers are named individuals, not roles. If the Quality Manager changes, the fixed-approver configuration is updated — a small admin task. If the Quality Manager is out of office, Microsoft’s Entra ID delegation / out-of-office mechanics still apply at the notification layer, but the approval record ties to the named Quality Manager.

Group approvers (i.e., “any member of the QA team can approve”) are not supported. Named individuals is the design choice; it produces cleaner audit evidence.

Sequential approval — the broader approval workflow that fixed approvers plug into.
Audit log — how fixed-approver events are captured.
Template-driven creation — the document-type binding that drives fixed-approver configuration.

Lifecycle stage: Approve →

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Read the full guide

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