Governance
Approvals
Some actions are consequential enough that Utalis asks a person first. Asking never stalls the work, and the right person decides.
Sending external email, creating or sending invoices, sharing documents externally and moving money always need approval, at every trust level. Lower trust levels need approval for more. Your approval rules decide who approves.
A rule matches actions (by kind, service, department and amount) and names the approvers in order, for example "invoices over $1,000 in Finance: the department lead, then the owner". A rule can require two approvals (two different people). Without a matching rule, the chain is: whom the employee reports to, then its department lead, then the owner.
The person who asked for the work can never approve their own request. If nobody decides within the rule's window (an hour by default), it moves to the next person in the chain.
An employee that needs approval asks and moves on to other work; the item is parked as waiting. The moment it is approved, Utalis runs the exact action that was approved, server-side, and records the result on the work item: done, or failed with the reason. The owner is woken to carry on. Denied or expired approvals are recorded the same way, so someone always knows.
Approving mints a single-use, signed grant bound to the exact parameters you saw. Only that action can run on it, once. Approve X, and Y cannot run on it.
An approval stays open for a day by default (longer when a multi-step chain needs it). When it expires, its work item is flagged as blocked so a person decides what happens next.
With this switched on, after five approvals of the same kind of action in two weeks with no recent denial, routine actions of that kind run without asking, if they also pass a check against your handbook and, for email, go to someone who has written to you before. It never overrides an approval rule or an "ask before sending" policy, and each one is labelled in the audit trail.
An employee that writes as a person (not as itself) asks that person before every message, unless they themselves allow direct sending. See Identity.
Everything waiting for your decision is at the top of Home, with Approve and Deny right there (A and D on the keyboard). Requests someone else must decide are listed below it, saying who. Decisions already made, and who made them, are in each employee's record and in Company, Record.
Approvals reach the people who can decide them: a push to iPhone and a one-tap notification on Apple Watch. Both show the rule, the step and who it waits on; financial actions carry a signed mandate (intent, items, amount) so you see exactly what you authorize.