What is the Booking Approval feature?
When activated, the Booking Approval feature inserts a booking approval workflow step before a booking is offered to a freelancer. Hirers can create bookings and receive the necessary country-specific classifications before submitting their booking for approval. An approver is then required to either approve or reject the booking. If approved, the hirer can offer the booking to the freelancer. If rejected, the hirer can either edit & re-submit or discard the booking.
How does the approval workflow work?
When the feature is enabled, any new bookings that are created will be sent through the approval process, rather than the regular, direct-to-offer process.
The approval process looks like this:
Booking created
A booking is created as normal by a Hirer, but instead of it being immediately available for offer to the freelancer, it can only be ‘Submitted for approval’.
Booking submitted
Submitting the booking for approval triggers an approval request email, which is sent to all of the approval contacts - a chosen set of email addresses that are authorised to approve or reject a contract before it can be offered. (The contract is now considered pending until either an approval or rejection action has been taken, or it has been edited - which revokes the outstanding approval request, which needs to be sent again.)
Booking reviewed by approver
Approvers who receive the email approval request can then review the contract through YunoJuno, and choose to either approve or reject the booking.
Rejection - If the contract is rejected, the hirer is notified by email, and the booking can then be edited for resubmission or discarded. For details on why the booking was rejected hirers need to contact the reviewer.
Approval - If the contract is approved, the hirer is notified by email, and the booking becomes immediately able to offer.
Booking offered
After a booking has been approved, the booking can be offered to a freelancer as normal.
How can I enable the feature?
There are two options:
Enable the feature for all bookings
Enable the feature for specific hirers only
Please contact either your Account Manager or Platform Success team to enable the Booking Approval feature.
How do I manage the approvers?
You can decide to have approval requests sent to one or many email addresses including shared inboxes.
Please note, approval requests are sent to all email addresses.
Please contact either your Account Manager or Platform Success to manage your approvers.
Do approvers need to be registered users?
No, approvers do not need to be registered as YunoJuno users to approve or reject bookings.
The email address of the individual approver will still be captured for auditing purposes, even if a shared email inbox is being used.
Can a hirer edit a booking that has already been sent for approval?
Yes, hirers can edit and re-submit bookings. When an approver reviews a re-submitted booking the approver will be informed that the booking has since been edited, and may be resubmitted.
What happens if an approver tries to review a booking that has already been approved or rejected?
The approver will be informed that the booking has already been approved or rejected.
What happens if the hirer is the only approver?
The hirer is required to self-approve their booking or forward the approval request email to their manager or colleague.
What happens if a hirer attempts to self-approve their booking?
Due to the design which allows unregistered users to approve bookings, it is possible to self-approve bookings. Booking approvals are recorded for auditing purposes and is possible to identify approvers who have self-approver their own bookings.
If you are concerned about an individual approver self-approving their bookings, then they should not be an approval contact.
What happens when a booking is renewed?
Renewed bookings will go through the approval process.
How do approvals work with country-specific classification processes?
Country-specific booking classification processes will take place before the booking is submitted for approval.
Can this feature be tested?
Yes, you can enable this feature for individual hirers before activating it for all hirers.
How does this work if we need specific approvers to approve specific bookings?
As approval requests are emailed to all approvers, you have a few options:
Approvers identify their bookings by business unit (this is the default label, however, you may have renamed it). The business unit is visible in the approval email notification subject line and body.
Approvers can set up email rules to identify the bookings that they need to approve. For example, flag emails where the subject line contains their business unit, otherwise, mark them as read.
You can set up a shared inbox with rules to forward the approval email notifications to the relevant approver(s).