Submit and approve

Every controlled document has one working draft. Nothing you type reaches readers until that draft goes through review and publishes as a new version. Use this page when you are ready to hand a draft to an approver, or when a review is waiting on your decision.

Requesting approval

Open Governance → a document → and choose Request approval. You need the Writer role or higher on the document's team. A Reader is refused.

The dialog shows a change summary drafted from your edits (blocks changed, added, removed) and a Summary for the approver box, pre-filled and fully editable. Write what changed and why — the approver reads this before the diff.

Two things block a submit:

• Unresolved required inputs. If the document still has placeholders the template marked as required, fill them first.
• An archived document. Restore it before submitting.

Submitting seals the draft. The content freezes at exactly the bytes you submitted, and no one — including you — can edit it until the review is decided. That frozen snapshot is what the approver reads and what the decision is recorded against.

Who is notified

Alchex notifies the Owners of the document's team, excluding you. They get an in-app notification and the document appears in their review queue with a "waiting on your decision" count. Workspace admins and owners can also decide the review even though they are not on that notification list.

Who may approve

Deciding a review requires the Owner rung on the document's team. In practice that means a team Owner, or a workspace Owner or Admin (who count as Owner on every team). Writers and Readers cannot decide a review.

The separation-of-duties rule

The person who submitted a review cannot approve it. Alchex reads the submitter from the review record on the server, inside the same transaction that applies the decision — it is never taken from anything the browser sends, so it cannot be worked around by role. A workspace Owner who submitted the review is still refused, with the message: "You submitted this document for review, so you can't approve it yourself — another Owner has to decide it."

Two details matter, because they are easy to assume wrongly:

• The rule keys on the submitter, not the author. An Owner who wrote or edited the draft, or who happened to create it, may still approve it — as long as someone else submitted it. Contribution-level checks are out of scope; the activity log shows who touched what.
• You can still see your own review. The review screen opens for you and shows the footer "You submitted this draft — another owner must approve it". Your only actions there are Withdraw from review and reading the diff.

There is one sanctioned self-approval: an Owner may publish their own current draft directly from Review & publish. It is recorded in the log as a self-publish. Alchex refuses it while someone else's review is pending — decide that review instead of publishing over it.

Deciding: approve, request changes, withdraw

On the review screen the approver sees the change count since the published version, the submitter's name, the checkpoint the decision will record, and two actions.

Approving is not reversible as a step — to undo it you publish a further version. Deleting a document is permanent and takes its draft, published versions, history and review comments with it.

Document states

While a document is in review, its type and code are locked, and a rename applies only after the current review publishes.

Related: review comments, publishing, versions, permissions.