Every document you send for sign-off gets one item in your Inbox that follows it from beginning to end. Submit a purchase order and the item appears, reading Submitted and naming whoever it is waiting on. The same item later becomes Approved or Rejected — you never get a second, separate message, and you never have to go looking for the first one.
To see only these items, filter the inbox by the kind My submissions. That list is everything you have submitted, in one place. (Decisions waiting on you are different — they arrive as Needs action items in the same inbox.)
What the Item Tells You
| It reads | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Submitted: … | In flight. The line underneath names the person it is waiting on, and the level it has reached. |
| Escalated: … | An approver missed their deadline, so the system forwarded the request to the fallback approver. |
| Approved: … | Everyone required has signed off. The document has moved forward. |
| Rejected: … | An approver turned it down. Their reason is the text underneath, word for word. |
Open the item to read the detail, or use its Open action to jump straight to the document.
When It Interrupts You, and When It Doesn’t
The item only comes back to the top of your inbox — unread again — when something happened that you would want to know about:
- an approval that missed its deadline and was escalated, and
- the final verdict.
Ordinary progress does not disturb you. When one approver signs off and the request moves to the next, the item quietly rewrites itself so it never names someone who has already acted, but it stays read and stays where it is. You always see the truth without being pinged for every step.
Why a Request Might Sit at “Submitted”
It is waiting on someone else’s decision. The item names them; open the underlying document to see the full chain — who decided what at each level, and who holds it now.
If a request has been waiting a long time, check whether the assigned approver is away. An administrator can configure a delegation grant so their decisions forward to a deputy automatically.
After a Rejection
When a request is rejected, your document goes back to Draft. You can then:
- Open the document — the inbox item links straight to it.
- Read the rejection reason (it is in the item, and in the document’s approval history).
- Edit the document — fix the problem the approver flagged.
- Submit it again. That starts a fresh request with its own inbox item; the old one stays on record for the audit trail.
Cancelling a Request
If you submitted a document by mistake, you can cancel the request from the underlying document while it is still in flight. Its inbox item is filed away automatically — you withdrew it, so it does not need to keep watching itself — and you can still find it under the Done tab. Cancelled requests cannot be revived; submit a fresh one instead.
Documents Approved Instantly
Some documents match a workflow with no approval steps, which approves them on the spot. You still get an item, already reading Approved — so “did it go through?” always has an answer in the same place.