Trace an approval decision

What this achieves

Every approval decision is recorded with the person who made it, the time, and the reason they gave. This page is how you find one when somebody asks who authorised something.

Required role: Administrator.

Steps

Go to Approvals → Decisions.
Search by the request, the approver, or the reason given.
Narrow the list to approvals, rejections, deferrals, or escalations.
Read the row: what was decided, by whom, when, and why.
Follow the instance reference on the row to see the whole route that decision sat in.

What the decisions log holds

Option	Description
Entity type / Entity	What the decision was about.
Decision	Approved, rejected, deferred, or escalated.
Decided by	The person who made it. Where a delegate acted, this is the delegate.
Date	When it was made.
Reason	The comment the approver wrote.
Instance	The route the decision belonged to.

Three figures sit above the list: total decisions, approval rate, and average decision time. An approval rate at or close to 100% is worth a second look — it usually means the step is a formality rather than a control.

Example: Sophie Clarke is asked who authorised a promotion in July 2026. She filters the decisions log to approvals, searches the employee, and reads the approver, the date, and the reason in one row.

The wider audit trail

Approvals → Audit Logs records more than approval decisions: creations, updates, deletions, publishes, archives, exports, reassignments, and sign-ins, across the modules that write to it.

Option	Description
Module	Which part of the product the action happened in.
Action	What was done.
Entity	What it was done to.
Actor	Who did it, or System where no person was involved.
Severity	Info, warning, or critical.

Selecting a row that recorded a change shows Before and After beneath the table, so you can see exactly what was altered rather than only that something was.

Example: a route that started sending requests to the wrong approver is traced by filtering the log to workflow updates and reading the before-and-after on the publish that changed it.

Producing evidence

Export CSV takes the filtered audit list out as a file. For a single request, the stronger evidence is the audit document available on the instance itself, which sets out the whole route and every decision on it in readable form.

Filter before exporting. An unfiltered export answers nobody’s question.

What you cannot do here

These are records, not workspaces. You cannot edit a decision, remove an entry, or change a reason after the fact — which is what makes the log worth producing when someone asks.

If a decision was wrong, the correction is a new action with its own record, not an amendment to the old one.

What happens next

A traced decision usually points at either a route to fix or a conversation to have. Where the route is wrong, change it in a new version; where a step was approved without scrutiny, the approval rate on that step is the evidence for changing who is asked.