Most automation is all or nothing. Either the refund goes out on its own, or someone does the whole job by hand: finds the order, checks the amount, opens Stripe, writes to the customer. Yet the part that really needs a person is usually one decision in the middle. Everything around it is legwork.
Lodol workflows can now stop at that one point and ask. The new Request approval step pauses a run until the right person approves, rejects or replies, from Lodol, from their inbox or from Slack. Then the run carries on with their answer. Everything waiting on you is on the new Approvals page in the sidebar.
How it works
Say your support team logs refund requests in a Google Sheet. A workflow starts when a new row arrives, gathers what it needs, and gets to the point where money would move. There it asks:
Refund $240 to Dana Ortiz for order 1182? Reason given: arrived damaged.
You write the question in plain words and drop in values from earlier steps, so the person deciding sees the customer, the amount and the reason without opening anything else. The run waits. If they approve, the next steps issue the refund in Stripe and email the customer. If they reject, a different path runs, such as a note back to the agent who logged it. You draw both paths with an ordinary If / Else after the approval step, the same way you'd branch on anything else.
The right person, every time
An approval is only a control if it reaches the person who owns the decision, and only them. So you choose:
- Who to ask, and who may answer. The finance lead for a refund, the marketing lead for a public post.
- How long they have, and what happens if nobody answers. Treat it as approved, treat it as rejected, or stop the run. You decide in advance, so a quiet inbox never leaves the workflow guessing.
- Whether people can approve their own requests. Turn on Require a different approver and nobody can sign off on something they asked for.
Answer from wherever they are
People in your workspace can answer in Lodol, where the Approvals page lists everything waiting on them, or from their inbox. People outside your workspace, like your outside accountant or a client who signs off on their own campaigns, answer from a link in their email, with no Lodol account needed. And a request can also be posted to a Slack channel, for the decisions a whole team keeps an eye on.
Never left waiting
Decisions stall. Someone is on holiday, or the email sits under fifty others. Reminders nudge the people you asked while a request waits, and escalation brings the request to more people when a decision is taking too long.
A run waiting on a person also doesn't count against the runs your workspace can have going at once. A request that sits over the weekend never holds up your other workflows.
When you need an answer, not a yes
Some questions aren't yes or no. Which PO number does the Harbor Supply bill go against? Which of these dates suits the client? Set the step to ask for a written reply instead of a decision, and later steps get the reply along with who wrote it and when.
Use a reply only when a person really has to supply something. For a yes or no, an approval is clearer: the workflow gets a decision it can act on, not words it has to interpret.
Every decision on the record
The decision, any comment left with it, who decided and when are all handed to the steps that follow. A workflow can branch on them, write them into the sheet next to the refund, or include the approver's comment in the note back to the agent. Every decision is also recorded in the workspace's audit log, so months later "who approved this?" has an answer that doesn't depend on anyone's memory.
Where to put one
An approval belongs wherever a mistake would be expensive or embarrassing, and nowhere else. Asking about everything teaches people to click Approve without reading. A few good places to start:
- Refunds over a limit. Put the approval inside an If / Else, so refunds under $50 go straight through and anything larger waits for a manager.
- Anything that goes public. An AI step drafts this week's post for your Facebook Page from your notes. A person reads it before it's published, and a rejected draft goes nowhere.
- Replies to customers. AI drafts the answer to a support email, and a person approves it before Gmail sends it.
- Spending. A large order or an unusual expense waits for the budget owner, with the amount and the details in the request.
What it won't do
It won't decide for anyone. Until someone answers, the run simply waits. If the time runs out, it does exactly what you chose in advance, the same way every time. The steps before the approval run straight away, so by the time a person is asked, everything they need is already in front of them.
That's the design we think automation should have, AI included. Let the workflow do the gathering, the reading and the drafting, and let a person make the call where it matters. We wrote about why in Lodol's Principles for Reliable AI.
Add a sign-off to the workflow that worries you most.
In the editor, add a Request approval step just before the step you'd want to check, and an If / Else after it. The approvals guide covers every setting. Start free if you don't have a workspace yet.