Audience: System Administrators and Power Users
Overview
Contract Eagle allows you to set up automated approval workflows, ensuring contracts follow your organisation's governance and compliance processes.
Approval rules let you define when a contract needs approval, who should approve it, and what happens once it’s approved or rejected.
These workflows help streamline internal reviews, reduce bottlenecks, and provide full visibility of approval history.
This guide walks you through how to define and manage approval rules in the system - from setting trigger conditions to configuring notifications and multi-step approvals.
Approval rules allow you to configure specific conditions under which a contract must be approved before it progresses. These can be triggered based on contract type, business unit, or contract status.
For example, you could require that all leases from a specific business unit with a particular status must be approved by legal and then finance.
Where to set up Approval Rules
To access approval rules:
Go to the Configuration menu.
Click on Approval Rules.
You can create new rules or edit existing ones from this screen.
Step-by-step: creating an Approval Rule
1. Define Trigger Conditions and Rule Name
Approval Rule Name
An optional name for the approval rule. When entered, this name appears in the approval summary and next to the approver’s name on the Approval History popup.
Trigger Conditions
Approval rules can be triggered when a contract is:Created
Updated
Or both
You can specify conditions based on:
Contract Type
Business Unit
Contract Status
Tip: You can apply rules broadly (e.g., to all business units) or narrowly by combining multiple conditions (e.g. "All Confidentiality Agreements with a status of Review Requested", etc.).
Active
Leave it checked for a new Approval role or uncheck it to deactivate an existing rule. Inactive rules won’t apply to new or newly updated contracts, but they will still apply to any contracts that triggered the rule before it was made inactive.
2. Manage Approval Flow as a Task
Enable this option to manage the approval process through a Task in Contract Eagle.
When checked:A Task is automatically created for each approval.
If enabled on an existing rule, it will apply only to contracts added or updated after the rule is saved.
Note: An active Approval Task Type must be set up to use this feature.
Select the Task Type to use for the Approval Task. This field appears only when “Manage Approval Flow as a Task” is enabled.
3. Configure Approvers
Choose who is responsible for approving:
Assign a specific user
Or assign by contract role (e.g., Legal Reviewer)
You can also control whether:
Self-approval is allowed (e.g., the person creating the contract can also approve it)
Multiple approvers are allowed in sequence
4. Set Post-Approval Actions
Determine the status the contract should change to:
After approval (e.g., “Financial Approval Required”)
After rejection (e.g., “Returned for Review”)
5. Notification
These settings define who will receive a notification when a contract is approved or rejected. Notifications can be sent to:
Specific users selected in the rule, or
Users assigned to roles on the contract (e.g., Contract Owner, Legal Reviewer)
This ensures the right people are kept informed of contract progress and outcomes without needing to manually follow up.
Multi-Step Approvals
You can create multi-step workflows by chaining rules - set the "Status after approval" to one that will trigger another approval rule.
Example:
Rule 1:
Contract status = “Legal Approval Required”
If approved, set status = “Financial Approval Required”Rule 2:
Triggered by that new status
If approved, final status = “Fully Approved”
Tracking and Logging Approvals
Each approval action - whether it’s an approval or rejection - is fully tracked and logged in the contract’s history (Contract View/Edit screen -> History tab). This includes the date and time of the decision, the name of the approver, and any comments they may have added.
This detailed audit trail ensures full transparency and accountability throughout the approval process. You can always review who approved what and when, helping your organisation maintain compliance and easily resolve any questions about contract status.