Approvals

Your approval queue

Your turn, the first page you see in Arbituro, lists everything waiting on you, in the projects you belong to. From any other page, the Your turn count at the top right opens it beside the page you’re on.

Start

New work waiting for you to start it, and work whose start date has come.

Answer

Questions from agents, runs that stopped, and results nobody is accountable for yet.

Approve

Actions that happen only when you approve them.

Judge

Delivered results waiting for your verdict.

Among them are actions agents want to take, questions they asked, results to judge, acceptance criteria you decide, board moves to sign off, requests from intake forms, and connections that need attention.

• Anything that has waited three working days or more comes first, under Waiting longest.
• Filters narrow the queue by project, by kind, by risk and by text. Risk applies to agents’ actions: read only, internal change, or a side effect outside the workspace.
• Mentions, in the queue’s header, lists the notes that mention you.
• Single-key shortcuts move through the queue and decide items. You can turn them off on your profile.
• Your morning brief is a summary of the same queue. See briefs and digests.

Approve what an agent does

An agent pauses and asks before it:

• creates, changes, assigns or comments on jobs in Arbituro
• sends a message, posts, or books a meeting through a connection
• creates or changes anything in a connected service, such as a CRM record, a Jira issue or a GitHub comment
• proposes code changes in GitHub

Reading through a connection the agent has been given runs without asking. Some actions are never allowed at all, whoever approves: merging pull requests, closing issues, creating branches or pull requests directly, and any action Arbituro doesn’t recognise.

Who can approve

• For an action through a workspace connection: the connection’s owner, and the people they have let approve for it, if they are members of the job’s project.
• For an action through a personal connection: only the person who made the connection.
• For an action inside Arbituro: the project’s owners and project admins.
• Workspace viewers can’t approve.

Connection owners choose who may approve, on the connection’s page. See Connections.

Deciding

Each action shows exactly what would happen:

• whether it leaves the workspace, and who the other service will record as acting
• a message’s sender, recipients, subject and body
• the changes to each file, for code
• the full request, with passwords, tokens and keys hidden

Check every recipient before you approve a message. An agent can be misled by what it reads.

Approve

The action runs. An action that leaves the workspace asks you to confirm a second time. Before it runs, Arbituro checks again that the agent still holds the connection and that you can still approve.

Deny

The action doesn’t run. Add guidance and the agent reads it, so it can try again a better way. You can’t edit an action before approving it, so guidance is how you ask for a change.

Not yet

For a follow-up email, asks the agent to draft it again on a later working day.

• An action nobody decides within 24 hours expires and never runs.
• In the list view you can approve or deny up to 50 actions at once. High-risk actions have to be decided one by one.
• Every decision is recorded with who made it. See Activity and audit log.

Approval in advance

For routine changes, a connection’s owner can approve one kind of action ahead of time, so agents don’t wait. On the connection’s page, under Approved in advance, choose Approve an action in advance, then pick:

• the action
• one agent, or any agent holding the connection
• how long: 7, 30 or 90 days

These actions can be approved in advance:

• Creating email drafts
• Commenting on pull requests and issues, creating issues, and proposing code changes in GitHub
• Creating Jira issues and comments, and Confluence pages
• Creating Salesforce tasks and HubSpot contacts
• Creating draft invoices in Xero
• Adding to Notion pages
• Scheduling Zoom meetings

Messages can never be approved in advance. Every email, Slack or Teams post, calendar invitation and DocuSign envelope is approved on its own.

• Each action an approval in advance covers is recorded as approved by the person who granted it, and the activity record says it was approved in advance.
• Revoking it takes effect at once, even for actions already approved that haven’t run. It also ends when the person who granted it loses the right to approve, leaves the workspace, or hands the connection on, and when the connection is deleted.

Sign-off on board moves

A project can require a sign-off, or a condition, before a job moves into a column of its board. Workspace owners and admins, and the project’s owners and project admins, set these rules on the project’s settings page, under Statuses, with Add a rule.

A person to sign

Anyone who can approve in the project, or a person you name. By default the person who asks for the move can’t sign it, including when an agent asked for them.

A fact to be true

The job’s acceptance criteria are settled, its result was accepted, or somebody owns it.

When someone moves a job into a column with a sign-off, Arbituro asks who should sign, and the job waits as pending. It still counts as being in its old column until it is signed. The signer approves or refuses in their queue or on the job, and a refusal needs a reason. A move that needs several sign-offs needs all of them, and one refusal ends the request. If nobody else can sign, Arbituro refuses the move straight away.