Document Review & Approval Workflow: Stop Chasing Sign-Offs by Email
Route a new or revised document through its reviewers and approvers in order, collect comments, capture an electronic sign-off (name, role, timestamp, meaning), and only mark it approved once every required signature is in — with a full audit trail for your next inspection.
A web tool where you submit a draft plus its approval route, reviewers add comments, approvers e-sign in the right order, reject-with-comments resets the route, and once every required approval is captured the tool marks the document approved, notifies the owner via Resend, and exports a complete sign-off record as CSV and PDF for auditors.
Before you start
- A Supabase account (free)
- A Vercel account (free)
- A Resend account (free)
- Your approval routes (the roles/people in sequence or parallel)
- A draft document file to test with
- Claude Code or any AI coding agent
The problem this kills
A new SOP, a revised work instruction, a customer-facing spec — it needs to go past an author, a couple of reviewers, and a final approver before it can be published. So you email the file around. Then you wait. Someone replies-all with comments, someone else approves "looks good" in a one-line reply, a third person is on vacation and the whole thing stalls. You re-send the latest version, lose track of who already signed off on which draft, and when the auditor asks "show me who approved version 3 and when," you're digging through six months of email threads.
It's slow, it's fragile, and it's exactly the kind of thing your quality system is supposed to control. The trail lives in inboxes instead of in one place. You don't need a six-figure document-control suite to fix this, and you don't need to be a developer.
What you'll build
A simple internal web tool. You submit a draft (the file, the document number, the version, and a change summary), then attach an approval route — the reviewers and approvers, in the exact order they should act, with support for both sequential steps ("approver B only after approver A") and parallel steps ("these three can review at once"). Reviewers open the document, leave comments, and either pass it along or send it back. Approvers e-sign — capturing their name, role, the timestamp, and the meaning of the signature (authored / reviewed / approved). The document cannot be published until every required approval is captured. The moment the last sign-off lands, the tool marks the document approved, notifies the owner via Resend, and lets you export the full sign-off record as a CSV and a PDF an auditor will accept.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — how documents move today, what your document-numbering and versioning convention looks like, who reviews versus who approves, which routes are sequential and which are parallel, what your sign-off meanings are, and the messy exceptions (an approver who's out, a reject that has to restart the route, a document that lives in two systems) — and then it tailors the data model, the routing rules, and every later step to your answers. This is not a generic template; the agent reflects a short spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before it builds anything. From there it walks the agent through submitting a draft, building the route, collecting comments, capturing ordered e-signatures, handling reject-and-reset, marking approved, notifying the owner, and exporting the auditor record — each step with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's also a fallback so you can build and use the whole thing today even with no integration to your existing document store.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
This is document control, so governance is the product. It ships with login so only your team can use it, row-level security so you only ever see your own organization's documents, and a complete audit trail of who submitted, reviewed, signed, rejected, and published — and when. The heart of it is a hard human-in-the-loop approval gate: a document stays in "in review" and cannot be published until every required approver has explicitly e-signed, and a single reject-with-comments sends it back and resets the route. Each e-signature captures the signer's name, role, timestamp, and meaning, so the record stands up to an audit. Duplicate guards keyed on document-number + version stop the same revision from being routed twice.
Who it's for
Quality managers, document controllers, and compliance leads who own SOPs, work instructions, and controlled documents — and who are tired of chasing approvals through email and reconstructing the trail later. If you can describe how a document moves from draft to approved in your shop, you can build this.
You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, answer the interview, and you'll watch your first document route itself the same afternoon.