Build a form with an approval workflow

The form is rarely the hard part. The hard part is what happens next: someone has to look at it, decide, and tell the person who submitted it. That usually becomes a forwarded email, a spreadsheet nobody updates, and a fortnight of “has anyone heard back about this?”

Nextforms puts the approval in the form itself.

Route it to the right person

Submissions do not all go to the same approver, so the workflow decides from the answers. Amount over a threshold, a particular department, a country that is not your own. Anything the form collected can pick the path, including individual parts of an address.

Approvals can run in steps, so a request clears a manager before it reaches finance, and each step sees the decision before it.

Reminders and escalation

An approval that sits in an inbox is the normal failure, so it is handled directly: the approver gets reminded, and if it is still sitting there, it escalates. Nobody has to remember to chase, which is what makes the difference between a workflow and a diagram of one.

Send it back instead of rejecting it

Most requests are not wrong, they are incomplete: a missing invoice number, a date that cannot be right. Rejecting means the person starts over and retypes everything.

Instead, an approver can send it back for correction. The submitter gets a link to their own answers, already filled in, changes the part that was wrong, and resubmits. The revision is linked to the original, so the history stays intact rather than becoming two unrelated submissions.

And then the rest of it

An approval is one step in the workflow, so a decision can trigger anything else: email the requester from your own address, add an approved row to Google Sheets, post to Slack or Teams, or fire a webhook at whatever system needs to know. Conditions and branching decide which of those happen.

If the form takes a payment, that fits too: approve first and charge after, or charge up front and approve the work.

What you need

The visual workflow builder is free, with the full engine: conditions, branching, routing, delays. Approval workflows with reminders and escalation are part of Pro, along with teams, which tends to matter at the same time, since an approval usually implies someone else to approve it.

Good for

Purchase and expense requests, time-off bookings, content and design sign-off, vendor onboarding, grant and membership applications, and any internal request that currently lives in somebody’s inbox.