Nothing published without you. How approval works on the Desk.

No. On every plan, a person approves every piece, and there is no auto-publish. A piece doesn't go live by itself: someone has to decide. This guide covers who can approve, what happens when the words change after a decision, how the decision log records it and how approved pieces reach WordPress. Once you know how each step works, you can set up approval before publishing in a way that suits your team.

The question comes up for good reason. If you run a site for a business, a member organisation or a client, what appears there goes out under someone else's name. You need to know who signed it off, and that what went live is what they signed off. The sections below show how the Desk handles both.

Who can approve a piece?

Roles decide who does what. There are three to know about.

• Owners manage everything, including billing.
• Editors start pieces by hand.
• Approvers approve or reject pieces.

Only owners and approvers can approve. Editors start pieces; they can't approve them. Because owners manage everything, the owner role has the widest reach, and it's sensible to keep it to the people who look after the account as a whole.

Take care over the approver role when you set up your team. Give it only to people you trust to sign off what appears under your name. For a small business that may be the owner alone. For a trade body it might be the person who already signs off member communications. For an agency, it might be the account lead for each client, so the person approving a piece is the person who answers for it.

Handing out the approver role widely spreads the decision thin. If five people can approve, you have five possible answers to "who said this was fine?". Fewer approvers, chosen on purpose, give you a clearer line of responsibility.

What happens if someone edits an approved piece?

An approval covers specific words. If an approved piece is edited, it goes back to awaiting approval, because the approval was for other words.

Here is how that plays out. An approver reads a piece about a local scheme and approves it. An hour later, a sentence in it is changed to make it tighter. The piece doesn't stay approved. It returns to awaiting approval, and it can't go anywhere until an owner or approver looks at it again.

The rule exists because a single changed sentence can alter a figure, a date or a claim about your organisation. The approver said yes to one version of the text. The new version hasn't had a yes from anyone.

The mistake to avoid is assuming a small fix after approval doesn't need a second look. A corrected typo and a changed price both count as edits. If you know a piece will need last-minute changes, make them before you ask for approval, so the approver only has to read it once and the words they approve are the words that go out.

What does the decision log record?

The decision log records every approval, rejection, reopening and edit. Each entry shows who made the decision, when they made it, and a fingerprint of exactly the text they decided on.

The fingerprint is what gives the log its value. A record that simply says a piece was approved on Tuesday tells you little if the text has been changed since. Because each entry is tied to the exact text decided on, any change to the text after a decision shows in the log. You can see the approval, and you can see that what came after it was different.

In practice, this gives you a record to check later. Say a client asks who signed off a piece and whether it was changed afterwards. You don't need to rely on memory or search through old emails. The log answers both questions from its own entries.

In our view, this is the part of the process that matters most. Roles control who is allowed to decide. The log ties each decision to a person, a time and a fixed set of words, and that record is what lets you answer for your site with confidence.

What happens when a piece is rejected?

Rejecting a piece needs a reason, and the reason is kept with the piece.

The reason is only as useful as what it says. "Not right" or "No" gives the team nothing to act on. Compare these:

• "The opening is about the scheme in general. Our members need to know whether it applies to firms with fewer than 10 staff."
• "This mentions a competitor by name. We don't do that on our site."
• "The tone is too formal for our readers. Shorter sentences, please."

Each one tells a colleague what to change, and each one still makes sense to someone reading it months later. Write rejection reasons a colleague could act on without asking you what you meant. That saves a round of back and forth. It also leaves a useful trail: over time, the reasons kept with rejected pieces show the standards your organisation applies.

How do approved pieces reach WordPress?

Approval isn't publication. On WordPress, approved pieces arrive as drafts, and someone still presses Publish.

That gives you two separate decisions by people. An owner or approver approves the piece on the Desk. Then a person in WordPress chooses to publish it.

The WordPress plugin tells the Desk who published the piece and when. So the final step is recorded as well as the approval. Between them, the decision log and the plugin's record cover the whole path from draft to live page: who approved which words, and who put them on the site.

That matters most when more than one person is involved. If a client or a member asks how a piece came to appear, you can point to the approver and the publisher by name, with a time for each, without piecing it together from memory.

What about regulated firms?

Regulated firms can add a compliance block that goes into every piece and needs its own approval. Required wording gets its own sign-off, separate from the story it sits in.

This suits organisations that have to include set wording with what they publish. Because the compliance block is approved in its own right, an approval of a story's content doesn't count as an approval of the required wording, and the reverse holds too. Each has a person's decision behind it.

If your firm needs set wording on every piece, use the compliance block rather than relying on someone to paste it in by hand each time. A block that goes into every piece won't be forgotten on a busy day, and its separate approval means the wording itself has been checked by a person before it goes out.

To see the whole process from setup to approval, read how the Desk works. A good first step is to decide who on your team should hold the approver role.