Report Approval Process

The GoPAD report approval process provides a mechansim for quality checking reports prior to approving them for general viewing on the GoPAD portal.

QA Status

Each report has a QA status, which is indicated by a coloured dot on the Reports page:

•	Rejected The report has been rejected. This may also mean that a report has been imported into GoPAD from another source, and does not yet have an approval status.
•	Awaiting Approval / In Review The report is either pending approval or is in review.
•	Approved The report has been approved, either automatically or manually. Once a report has been approved, it can be viewed by all users and can no longer be edited.

New Reports

When a new report is uploaded from the GoPAD App it will be allocated a QA status of either:

Approved, or
Awaiting Approval

The initial QA status is allocated depending on the user's Report Approval Rate. This allows you to determine what proportion of new and revised reports will required manual approval, and can be set on a user-by-user basis in the User Roles page:

Go to People > Team > {username} > Roles > Report Approval Rate.

For example, with a Report Approval Rate of 75% an average of 3 in 4 reports completed by that user will require manual approval, and will therefore be given a QA status of Awaiting Approval. 1 in 4 reports will be automatically approved when they are uploaded to the Portal, and will be given a QA status of Approved.

A Report Approval Rate of 100% will mean that no report is automatically approved and will require approval in the Portal before publication.

Note: Because only users with the Report Author role can complete new reports, the Report Approval Rate will only be displayed for users with this role.

How to Change the QA Status

The QA status of a report can be changed by any user with the Team Admin or Form Admin roles:

1. Log in to the Portal

2. Go to the Reports page

3. Select the report(s)

4. Select Review, Approve or Reject from the Actions dropdown

5. When the next page opens, confirm your action

How to Approve a Report

The process to follow to approve a report is up to you. Some users like to view a PDF of the report, others prefer to use the Webform. Some like the QA reviewer to make any necessary changes, whilst others prefer to send to report back to the original author to make changes. Note however, that all changes are tracked, and we can send you a record of any changes if required for auditing purposes.

Limiting Access to Unapproved Reports

One of the main reasons of the report approvals process is to limit access to reports until they've been approved. This is controlled by the user roles.