Inside Activate
Workflow and Approval
Auto-Cancel for Incomplete Approvals
3 min
some organisations experience delays when users fail to approve or decline requests in activate this often results in jobs being routed to the service desk—teams that may not have the authority to approve or decline, creating bottlenecks and additional workload to address this, you can enable auto cancel within activate this feature automatically cancels jobs that remain in an approval state beyond a defined time period, encouraging users to take timely action before implementing auto cancel, communicate this change to your users they must understand why their jobs are being cancelled and the impact of not responding to approval requests promptly configuration options global level apply auto cancel across all approvals approval level apply auto cancel to specific approval steps within a workflow configure global auto cancel open activate administrator and go to click add after in the timeout actions editor , configure name (for the timeout rule) timeout after (how long before auto cancel applies) click add cancel optionally, add a custom message to explain why the job was cancelled click ok (optional) add additional custom messages under the custom messages tab click ok to save configure auto cancel for a specific approval open the workflow you want to customise select the approval node , then click the timeout button configure the timeout in the timeout editor using the same steps as the global setup notes auto cancel only affects jobs waiting for approval jobs in a delay , ticket , or waiting for a child job are not affected if you set a timeout on a workflow approval step, default approvals will not run you’ll need to configure any required escalations and reminders within the step