Thanks!!! How many times does one have to be reminded about the greatness of Flowsana (@Phil_Seeman) and Asana2Go (@lpb)???
Go (finally) take the time to check these platforms out so you can be great! [Assignee: Jerod, Due Date: Immediately!]
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Thanks for your feedback @LEGGO! We already have a thread on this topic so I’ve gone ahead and merged your. post with [Rules] Automation include “Add Approval” to centralize feedback!
Thanks @Phil_Seeman for the tip! 
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I would greatly appreciate this as well. We use Scrum to organize our products and when something moves the section “QA,” we’d like it to automatically be “Marked as Approval.”
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Hello!
I’m hopeful this can get moved forward. We are looking to create a time off request process using forms. I’d love to make this an approval task so it is clear and would allow next steps to be done effectively.
Any thoughts on the status of this feature request?
Thank you!
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Related - We would like to add an “Approval task is almost due” Trigger to Rules. Our wanted use case = When an approval task is approaching due date, it will send a message to a certain Microsoft Teams channel. Thanks!
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Much agreed. I want a Rule Action that allows an approval to be auto added.
Example: We are wanting to do Time Off Requests with approvals. So every request that’s added - via a form - would then auto be added to
Is there a way to enable this functionality via APIs?
Yes!
Set the task’s resource_subtype to a value of approval , and set its approval_status to one of these values: pending, approved , rejected , or changes_requested.
Just to circle back here – I ended up doing what @Phil_Seeman mentioned.
When a task is added, I use Zapier via Webhooks to find that task and change it to an approval, along with performing some other actions. It’s a bit cumbersome, but does work.
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I have an issue that if anyone can help it would be greatly appreciated. I am looking to create a rule that can create an approval subtask rule as I have multi approval processes. Yet it seems that all I can do is create a subtask with a complete task. How do I get it to automate creating a subtask approval?
Hey @anon35354999 welcome to the Asana Community Forum 
Currently it is not possible to set this up via rules yet. I recommend upvoting here: [Rules] Automation include “Add Approval”
And Nick also mentioned a potential workaround [Rules] Automation include “Add Approval” - #29 by Nick_Rivero
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Hi @anon35354999 and welcome to the forum!
I’m not exactly sure what you mean by “approval subtask rule”. Do you mean you want to create a subtask via a rule and have that subtask be an approval task? Or you want to create a subtask via a rule and then have a different rule which then applies to that subtask? If you could clarify…
I want to create a subtask via a rule and have that subtask be an approval task
Hi @anon35354999,
Ah, got it. This is not currently possible with native Asana. It is available in the “Add subtasks” rule action in our Flowsana integration, though. 
Hi team,
From today onwards you should now be able to add approvals to a task via Asana Rules. This doesn’t change the main task but rather allows you to create a subtask of type approval. Hope that helps!
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Hi everyone!
As @Daniel_Iversen shared in the last comment, we are excited to let you know the new action “Approvals” is now available to all Business and Enterprise customers 
We still don’t offer an action in Rules that converts an existing task to an approval but this new action could be a good workaround if you’d like to automatically create approvals subtasks using Rules. See more details in these screenshots below:
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Yea im sorry that doesn’t really make sense. That task that requires an approval that was created not some other task now…
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Thanks for this addition. I’ve gone ahead and used it for a few days but it’s kind of pointless as it functions like every other “subtask”.
The “mark as approval” feature offers a completely different thing which is to mark the task itself for approval then enrol into an approval process.
Still waiting for the real feature!!
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yeah it would be wonderful if it could also convert the task into an approval task rather than adding a subtask or subtasks
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This is now a big mess. There are now two different things being referred to as “approvals” with little to differentiate them. Let’s call them “Completion Approvals” and “Subtask Approvals”.
Completion Approvals
This is what you get when you right-click on the three dots on a task select “Mark as Approval”.
Instead of marking a task as “Complete”, you then can mark it as “Approved” (or request changes or reject it)
This essentially overrides the “completion” field of the task. If the task is marked as “approved” here, the tasks will be hidden from the board if “incomplete tasks” is selected.
Subtask Approvals
This is what you get when you add an “Approvals” action as part of a rule.
However, it’s very different from the “completion approvals”. All it does is create a sub-task on the task that can be approved, rejected or cancelled. This sub-task is not linked to anything else.
Problems
This causes a number of problems:
- When creating a rule, the “Approvals Status” trigger and the “Approvals” action are unrelated things with the same name.
- The “Mark as Approval” status of a task can’t be changed using a rule. You still have to do this manually.
- The “Subtask Approvals” can’t be used as a trigger for other actions. Even if someone marks your approval subtask as approved, you still have to go in manually and do the next steps.
Solution
- Please fix this so that “mark as approval” can be changed using a rule. Eg. once you set the custom field “Progression” on a task to “Pending Approval”, it changes the task to being ready for approval.
- Rename the subtask approvals to “checks” or something else so they aren’t as easily confused.
- Even better, let “mark as approval” be selectable as the default for new tasks for that project. You can already set this up as a task template, but since forms can’t use task templates, this doesn’t help. There should be a project-wide setting that chooses whether you want tasks “completed” or “approved”.
I hope you found this useful.
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Hi @Peter_Kapitola,
To clarify, they actually aren’t two different and unrelated things. They are both the exact same “Approval” object. (That is, they’re both a particular type of task that has the top buttons you illustrate.)
The main reason that they seem different isn’t that they’re different things but that subtasks have different behaviors in Asana than top-level tasks that are attached to a project. Most relevant for this discussion, the significant behavioral difference is that rules don’t apply to subtasks. (As an aside, in our Flowsana integration, subtasks can trigger rules and be changed by rule actions, but that’s a discussion for another day.)
Having said that as a preface, let’s go through your points:
Per above, they’re actually not unrelated: the Approvals action creates subtasks which are of that special “Approval” type, and the “Approvals Status” trigger responds to the state of one of these special “Approval”-type tasks. The only catch here, that makes them feel different, is that the Approval subtasks created by that rule action can’t be made to respond to the “Approval Status” trigger. But again, it’s not that the objects are different/unrelated, it’s just that subtasks can’t trigger rules.
That’s just a rule action that doesn’t currently exist in Asana. It applies to all “Approval”-type tasks, whether a top-level task or subtask.
Again, this is just because subtasks can’t trigger rules, not because “Approval” subtasks are a different unrelated object to the “Approval” top-level tasks.
So, the two requests that would resolve this for you would be:
- Allow subtasks to trigger rules and respond to rule actions
- Add a rule action that can modify the state of an “Approval” type of task
That’s a totally valid enhancement request, but mostly unrelated to the specific above discussion about “Approval”-type tasks as top-level tasks vs as subtasks.
I hope the above was helpful in clarifying things. I tried to be as clear as I could but I agree with you that it's not ideal!
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