Act on approvals in bulk

What this achieves

A bulk action decides several waiting requests in one step instead of opening each one. It suits a queue of requests you already understand, and it is the wrong tool for anything you have not read.

Required role: Administrator or Manager.

Before you start

Bulk selection is available on the Pending tab only. Tasks that already have a decision cannot be selected, which is why the checkboxes disappear when you move to All or Completed.

Steps

Go to Approvals → Task Inbox.
Stay on the Pending tab.
Tick the tasks you want to decide. A bar appears showing how many are selected.
Select Approve Selected or Reject Selected.
Enter Comments. The comment is required, and the same comment is written to every task in the selection.
Confirm.

The comment is shared, so write a shared reason

One comment covers the whole selection. That is fine when the reason genuinely is the same, and misleading when it is not.

Example: Olivia Bennett approves five training requests for her Engineering team against an agreed budget. “Approved against the Q3 Engineering training budget” is true of all five. “Discussed at your review” is not, and should be entered on each task individually.

Check the count you get back

Each task in the selection is decided on its own. One task that cannot be actioned does not stop the others.

The confirmation tells you how many tasks were actioned. If that number is lower than the number you selected, the remainder were not decided — they are still on the Pending tab. Open them individually to see what stopped them.

Example: Olivia Bennett selects six tasks and the confirmation reports five approved. The sixth is still listed as pending, so she opens it and reads the task before deciding it on its own.

When not to use it

Option	Description
Same request type, same rule	Reasonable. The decision is genuinely one decision applied several times.
Mixed request types	Avoid. The comment will not fit all of them, and the detail you would have read is exactly what you are skipping.
Anything with money attached	Open each one. A bulk approval is still an approval, and it is recorded against your name in the same way.
Anything already breached	Open it. A breached deadline usually means it escalated to you from someone else, and the context matters.

What happens next

Every task in the selection is recorded separately, each with your name, the time, and the shared comment, and each route continues from its own step. There is no bulk undo — a decision made in bulk is reversed the same way as any other, which is to say not at all from this screen.