ApprovalRail Help Center

After signing in with Google you land on the onboarding screen. Name your organization and we automatically create a “General” team with you as the owner and manager.

Go to People and click Invite People. Enter emails, choose a role (member, manager, admin, or owner), add an optional message, and send.

Recipients get a 7-day link. Accepted invites count toward your plan limit.

Visit the Billing page (owners and admins only).

Use the toggle at the top of the plan comparison. Annual plans save approximately 17%. Changes are prorated through Stripe.

Go to Templates → New Template.

Name it “PTO Request”, choose type “pto”. Add fields: date-range (required), number for days (required), textarea for reason.

Set approvers to “Manager of the selected team”. Save. Your team can now submit from the Requests page.

In the template editor you can add any supported field type: text, textarea, number, date, date-range, select (with options), email, url, checkbox, or file.

Use the row/column layout controls to arrange fields in a clean grid. Changes are live immediately for new requests.

Go to Requests → New Request.

Choose a team you belong to, pick a template, fill the fields, and submit.

You will receive email updates when approvers respond. All activity is visible on the request detail page.

When you create a request you select a team. The template approver rules are evaluated at submission time:

“manager” resolves to all isManager members of that team; “specific_user” adds the exact person; “team_manager” targets managers of another team.

All approvers are created as pending approvals in parallel. The request becomes approved only when every approval is approved. Any single rejection marks the whole request rejected.

Managers and approvers see pending items at /approvals.

Click any request to open the full context (original fields, comments, previous decisions).

Add an optional comment and choose Approve or Reject. The system updates the aggregate status instantly and notifies the requester.

Every request has a complete history on its detail page (created, comments, approvals, status changes).

Organization-level audit is at /audit (owners and admins).

Retention is 30 days on Free, 1 year on Plus, unlimited on Advanced. Old logs are soft-deleted by a scheduled job on lower plans.

On any request detail you can leave a comment. Type @name to mention someone. Mentioned users receive an email (if their settings allow). All comments are part of the permanent audit record.

Owners and admins go to Integrations.

Create a webhook, choose which events to receive (request_created, request_status_updated, approval_status_updated, etc.), and save the secret.

We sign every payload with HMAC-SHA256. Delivery attempts and responses are logged for the last 10 calls. Use the secret to verify authenticity on your end.

Native two-way sync is not yet built. You can achieve a one-way handoff today by using the “request approved” webhook event to create issues in Linear via Zapier/Make or your own code. We store a linearIssueId field for future use.