Reviewing and Approvals

Reviewing advances is how the production team confirms that responses are correct, requests are feasible, and all information has been accounted for. BackOps supports reviewing questions and requests inline, as well as a two-stage approval workflow for request items that require operational and supply-side sign-off.

Where to Review

Production team members can review advance responses in two places:

Directly on the collaborator's advance page — the same page the collaborator fills out. Reviewers can read responses in context and take action on individual items as they go.

In the Advance Manager — the event-wide roll-up view that shows all responses organized by module. This is the more efficient path when reviewing the same module type across many collaborators at once.

Assigned Reviewers

Each module on an advance can have an assigned reviewer — the person responsible for reviewing that module's content. The assigned reviewer is not the same as the approver for requests; review responsibility and approval responsibility are handled separately.

Assigning a reviewer to a module is optional but useful on larger events where different team members own different sections of the advance.

Reviewing Questions

Question responses have a review control inline next to each item. When a reviewer has confirmed a response is correct, they mark it as reviewed. If task tracking is enabled on that module, marking a question as reviewed moves its corresponding task into the configured Done status.

If a collaborator later edits a response that has already been reviewed, it automatically returns to a needs review state so the reviewer knows to look at it again.

Reviewing and Approving Requests

Request items go through a more involved review process because they may require both operational confirmation and fulfillment confirmation. BackOps supports a two-stage approval workflow for requests.

Advance approval is the first stage. It represents the production-side decision — typically made by the person coordinating the advance, such as a stage manager or vendor coordinator. Approving a request at this stage means: "This is approved from our end."

Resource approval is the second stage. It represents the supply-side confirmation — typically made by the person or team that will actually provide the resource, such as a vendor or internal department. Approving here means: "We can fulfill this."

Whether one or both stages are enabled on a given request depends on how the request block was configured in the module template. Requests that don't require approval workflow can be reviewed without going through either stage.

Each approval can be set to three states:

• Approved — the request is confirmed at this stage
• Rejected — the request is denied at this stage, with an optional reason
• Pending — the default state, or the result of resetting a prior decision

Resetting to pending is useful when a decision needs to be revisited after new information comes in.

Approval Permissions

Performing approvals requires the appropriate permissions on the collaborator or resource, depending on which approval stage is being acted on. Not every event member can approve requests — access is controlled by the advance approval permissions configured for the event.