Best way to set up forms that need multiple internal approvals?

I’m leading a team that’s onboarding Asana right now, and one of our biggest obstacles so far has been how to integrate our forms. We’re on paper forms organization-wide right now, and this is the first step towards digitizing everything. To give context, our team is less than 10 people but our organization has about 70 staff that does work all over the world.

Two forms that are the backbone of this particular team are going to be our guinea pigs for how this process will look in the future. They are travel request forms, one for domestic travel and one for international travel. In order to submit our paper forms, staff members must get multiple signatures. These include approvals from their direct supervisor, our international department VP, and possibly the director of the region of the world they want to travel to. Without these signatures, the forms are not valid. There are times though that it takes a long time to get these signatures especially when some of these people are traveling themselves.

So we would like to use Asana forms to have people submit these online and automate what happens after a form is submitted. However, I’m unsure how to include these approvals. We’ve thought of using Zapier to connect Asana to Docusign or something similar, but that seems pretty clunky to me, and both are programs we’ve never used before, adding a further wrinkle to our onboarding. We would like to be able to have somewhere to deposit forms when they are completed, as we have to upload everything into our larger database and quickbooks somehow.

Does anyone have a good way to make this happen for our team?

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Hi Jonathan

I haven’t used Asana forms myself, but I’m just wondering, do they have to be actual signatures, or could the approvals be expressed by completing a task? I’m picturing a single task, with the relevant form attached, and subtasks assigned to each signatory. When they’ve seen the form and approve it, they just mark their subtask as complete. Each subtask contains a history which will confirm that it was completed by the correct individual.

The main task could be assigned to the person submitting the form. When all subtasks have been completed, they could mark the main task as complete.

Would that work?

Possibly. The problem is that the main person who needs to give approval is not on Asana and probably won’t be. He also tends to want to sign things by hand (not sure if that’s a generational or cultural thing), so moving to digital forms is already a jump for him.

Hey Jonathan, thank for reaching out on the forum. I am curious to see which solution you found to your case? I also have a company that I might onboard and they use currently Docusign, so I am wondering what would be the best option…

Haven’t seen an answer to this yet. @Rebecca_McGrath , is this part of another thread? I’m in currently in the same situation, but with much larger teams and in a HUGE organisation. We obviously have the top tier version.

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