I was just playing around with the Approvals feature and noticed that other than the 3 buttons for Accept, Request changes, and Reject, these are just essentially regular tasks. I’ve seen videos where people use Rules to have an automation create an Approval subtasks, but how are Approvals any different than a typical Subtask? Am I missing some functionality somewhere?
Additionally, I see that when an Approval is marked as “Approved” it triggers the Rule for a Completed task. Wouldn’t a “Completed” task be different than an “Approved” approval? Or are Approvals really designed to be independent tasks on their own, and not an original task?
Approval tasks just supply those three choices, but all three are considered “completing” the task because the approval task is just about the approval, not the underlying work being approved. For better or worse.
For automation, this doesn’t work well; better to use your own single-select custom field treating the approvals as steps or phases each as an option value.
For more manual approaches, I like to use approvals as subtasks because it allows multiple approval levels for a piece of work, they’re preserved with the parent task, and the completion behavior is less problematic.