Use the Approval Form in the SidePanel

When an automation includes an Approval Form, it pauses until someone on your team reviews the prepared content and approves or declines it. The SidePanel is where that review happens: the form appears next to the item it belongs to, whether you use the SidePanel as an Outlook app or as a browser extension.

This article is for the person reviewing the approval. For how to add an Approval Form to an automation as an administrator, see Add an Approval Form to an automation.

Where the Approval Form appears

Open the item in the tool you work in - an email conversation, a Salesforce case, or an SAP ticket - then open the SidePanel. Pending approvals appear on the Actions tab, which is selected by default.

The SidePanel always shows approvals for the item you currently have open. If a colleague opens the same item, they see the same pending approval.

To see an approval at all, an automation must use the Approval Form block and must have produced an approval step for the item you are viewing.

Reviewing the content

Each approval appears as a card. The card is titled Human approval, unless the person who built the automation gave it a name of its own.

The form itself is built by whoever designed the automation, so its contents vary. It can contain short text, long text, number, date and email fields, single and multiple choice questions, and tables. Some tables expand: rows with a small chevron open into a detail table beneath them.

Editing before deciding

Editable fields can be changed directly in the panel, for example a drafted reply that needs a different figure. Some fields are read-only, which keeps a value your models predicted visible without letting it be changed.

There is no Save button. Your changes are stored as a working draft automatically, a moment after you stop typing, so reloading the panel or switching to the side-by-side view does not lose them.

Approving or declining

• Approve saves your edits first, then submits the decision. The automation continues along its approved path with the content as you left it.
• Decline submits the decision on its own, without saving anything further. Edits already stored as a working draft stay where they are, but they are not validated or passed on, and whatever you typed in the last moment before clicking is never saved. The automation continues along its declined path, if one is configured. If you want your corrections used, approve instead.

There is no prompt for a reason or a comment when declining.

Once you decide, the card shows Processed with the decision, your name, and the date and time, along with a badge: a green check for approved, a red cross for declined. The card then collapses and no longer offers the decision buttons.

The buttons may be named differently

Your administrator can rename both decision buttons and the card title. An automation might show Send reply rather than Approve, and the processed state repeats whatever label you clicked, for example Processed (Send reply).

When Approve is not available

If a required field is empty or a value is invalid, Approve appears dimmed. Clicking it highlights every field that needs attention, and hovering over the button explains what is blocking it. No decision is recorded until the form is valid. Decline stays available: it is never blocked by an empty or invalid value.

A highlighted field gets a red border and its own message, so you do not have to guess which rule it broke: This field is required, Enter a number, Value must be between X and Y, Enter a valid email address, or, for a date, Use the DD/MM/YYYY format, naming whichever format the automation expects. The message appears when you leave a field with a bad value in it, or on all of them at once when you click a dimmed Approve, so it does not nag while you are still typing.

If a form passes these checks and is still refused when you approve, the error names the fields to look at, for example "Check these fields: Order number, Delivery date".

When a field could not be loaded

A field whose data the automation could not resolve is replaced by a warning box naming it, and a banner at the top of the form reads Not all fields could be loaded. What you can still do depends on the field:

• If the field was optional, Approve and Decline both stay available. You can decide the form as it stands.
• If the field was required, or it is a table, every decision is blocked and the banner says so. The field cannot be completed in the panel, so contact whoever owns the automation.

Reviewing side by side

Next to the tabs sits a full-screen icon labeled Open in window. It appears once the item has at least one approval, and opens a split-screen view: the message on one side and the item's approval forms on the other, with the decision buttons next to each other. Each card also has its own full-screen icon (Open full screen) that opens just that one form.

Approving in the split-screen view keeps the result on screen instead of collapsing it away, which is useful when you are working through a batch.

No approval showing?

If you expect an approval but the panel shows No actions yet, give it a moment: that is the panel still loading, and it clears by itself. An approval created while you have the conversation open then appears on its own, because the panel holds a live connection and does not need a reload.

If the panel shows nothing at all for the item, the most likely reason is that no automation produced an action for it. It is not the only one, though: the same empty panel appears when you do not have access to that inbox in Tekst, or when you are signed into a different Tekst organization than the automation ran in. See Troubleshoot the SidePanel for how to tell these apart.

Other states you may see

• The card turns into a processed one by itself. A colleague decided this approval first. The panel picks that up live, so the card switches to its processed state with their name and the time, without you reloading anything. Edits you had made but not yet approved are dropped at that point, because the decision that was recorded is theirs.
• Expired after 30 days. The review window closed before anyone acted, so the card shows a read-only snapshot of the form with a red alarm-clock badge and the date the window closed. The window is set per automation and 30 days is only the default, so the number you see may differ. The automation has moved on. Contact whoever owns the automation if the item still needs handling.
• This message can not be reviewed. The automation is off, was removed, or is blocked by your organization's rules, so the approval can no longer be decided.

See Troubleshoot the SidePanel if the panel itself does not load.