Approve or reject orders

When the approval policy says a submitted order needs a decision, the order gets an approval plan and waits in Waiting for approval (pending_approval) until the right people decide. This page covers the Order approvals screens: the inbox (console.muveya.com/approvals) and the decision screen (/approvals/<orderId>).

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Who can decide

These permissions never come with a role: an Owner or an Administrator also needs them granted. See Roles and permissions. Four rules decide which orders you can act on, all enforced by the server:

1. The decision permission. Without approvals.decide there is no inbox and no decision.
2. Location access. You only see and decide orders whose location is assigned to you. An order of another location answers as if it did not exist.
3. Stage permissions. Each stage of a plan names the permission its approvers must hold. Rules published from the console always require approvals.decide, so in practice every decider qualifies. You must hold the permissions of every step of the stage you decide.
4. Separation of duties. The person who requested an order can never decide it (see the section Separation of duties).

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How an order reaches the inbox

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The inbox

Open Order approvals in the main navigation. The screen is titled Order approvals: “Orders of your clinics waiting for your decision. You never see your own.” The inbox lists only orders in Waiting for approval, oldest first, and reads up to 200 pending orders at a time. It excludes:

• orders of locations not assigned to you;
• orders whose stages require a permission you do not hold;
• orders you requested yourself.

On Home, the Pending work section shows Orders waiting for your approval, with a count, when your inbox is not empty.

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Decide an order

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What each decision does

What the system records: one decision entry with the stage, the outcome, you as the decider, the server time, your comment, the policy version of the plan and the order version you decided on. The audit log also receives an approvals.decision entry. Decisions are never edited or deleted.

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Rules and limits

• The comment is optional, up to 500 characters; spaces at the start and end are removed.
• The stage must be part of the order’s plan.
• Each person decides a given stage of an order once. A stage that needs two approvals needs two different people.
• The same person may decide different stages of the same order, if they are eligible for each.
• A decision cannot be changed. If you approved a stage, you cannot later reject that same stage; the attempt is refused.
• Repeating exactly the same decision (for example, after reloading the page) does not create a second entry.
• You can only decide while the order is in Waiting for approval.

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Separation of duties

The requester of an order can never approve or reject it, even with approvals.decide:

• The inbox never lists your own orders.
• If you open your own order on the decision screen, you see You requested this order, so another person has to decide it. and no decision form. The order detail tells you: You requested this order, so another person has to approve it.
• If a decision on your own order reaches the server anyway, it is refused with You requested this order, so you cannot decide it. (approvals.self_approval_forbidden) and the attempt is recorded in the audit log as approvals.decision.denied.

Make sure each location has at least one eligible decider other than its usual requesters, or their orders will wait.

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Multi-stage and multi-approver plans

A plan can have several stages, and each stage can need more than one person:

• Every stage must be approved before the order moves to Approved. There is no fixed order between stages; approvers can decide them in any order.
• A stage that needs N approvals needs N different people. Until then, the order stays in Waiting for approval and keeps showing up in the inbox of the eligible people who have not decided that stage.
• One rejection is enough to reject the whole order.

For example, a plan “Clinic manager (2), Finance (1)” needs two different people to approve Clinic manager and one person to approve Finance. The order is approved when the third required approval arrives, whichever stage it completes. The order detail lists the same stages under Next step, so the requester can see what the order is waiting for.

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When the order changed before you decided

The decision is made against the version of the order your screen loaded. If something changed in between, nothing is recorded and the screen reloads the order: Review the refreshed screen before deciding again.

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Automatic approval

If the policy in force requires no stage for an order (no rule matches it, or the policy has no rules at all), the system approves the order by itself: it goes from Submitted straight to Approved and on to preparation.

• No person decides, so no decision entry is created and the decision history reads No decisions yet.
• The order keeps its plan with the policy version that approved it, and the audit log records approvals.auto_approved as a system action.
• If the dental clinic has no published policy at all, nothing is approved automatically: submitted orders wait in Submitted. After a policy is published, they move on the next time any order is submitted in the dental clinic. See Approval policy.

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Decision history

At the bottom of the decision screen, the Decisions section lists every decision on the order, oldest first. It is visible to members with approvals.decide for orders of their locations, whatever the order’s current status. Each entry shows:

• the outcome (Approved or Rejected), the stage and the person who decided (You for your own decisions);
• the date and time;
• the comment, if there was one.

If nobody has decided yet, the section reads No decisions yet. The history is append-only: entries are never changed or removed.

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Notifications

muveya does not send emails, WhatsApp messages or push notifications about approvals today. Approvers find pending work in two places: the Orders waiting for your approval card on Home, and the Order approvals inbox. Requesters follow their order’s status in Orders.

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What can go wrong

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Approvals outside the console

Decisions can only be made in the console. The MCP tools approvals.list_pending and management.pending_decisions are meant to read the same inbox, but they need approvals.decide, which the current read-only OAuth scope set does not grant, so they always answer common.forbidden. See MCP tools. The public API does not expose approval decisions.

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