Retrieving and managing approval processes in Zoho CRM gives your team visibility into which records are pending review, who needs to act, and what the full decision history looks like — all from within the CRM interface.
Why this matters
Approval processes in Zoho CRM are used to govern business activities such as authorising sales orders, budgets, or capital expenditure before they move forward. [2] Once a record enters an approval workflow, it becomes locked from edits until a decision is made, so knowing how to locate and monitor these processes is essential for keeping deals and operations moving. [2] Without a clear retrieval path, approvers may miss pending items and create unnecessary bottlenecks.
Step-by-step
Step 1. Sign in to your Zoho CRM account and navigate to the My Jobs tab in the top navigation bar. This is the central hub for all approval-related activity in Zoho CRM. [2]
Step 2. Inside My Jobs, click the Approval Process tab. This surfaces all records that are currently queued and waiting for your review or action. [2]
Step 3. On the Awaiting your Approval page, you will see every record that has been routed to you. From here you can approve, reject, or — if circumstances require it — delegate the approval responsibility to another user. [2]
Step 4. To retrieve the full decision history rather than just open items, click Approval History from within the same Awaiting your Approval page. This gives you a consolidated list of every record that has previously been submitted for approval, along with the outcomes. [2]
Step 5. If your organisation uses multiple approval processes for the same module, be aware that Zoho CRM evaluates them in the order they are listed. By default, processes appear in chronological order, so if you need to understand which process a record matched, check the sequence in which the processes are configured. [2] You can reorder these processes to control priority when criteria overlap. [2]
Step 6. To review or adjust the approval processes themselves (rather than individual records), go to Setup in Zoho CRM and locate the Process Management section. From there you can inspect each process's criteria, the chain of approvers, and any associated actions — such as field updates, email alerts, task creation, or webhook calls — that fire on approval or rejection. [2]
Step 7. Once you have located the relevant record in the approval queue, take your action (approve or reject) directly from the Approval Process tab. Only after a decision is recorded will the record become editable again and any configured post-approval actions execute. [2]
Common pitfalls
- Record locked unexpectedly. A record that has entered an approval process cannot be modified by anyone until it clears the workflow. If a colleague reports they cannot edit a record, check whether it is sitting in an approval queue under My Jobs > Approval Process. [2]
- Wrong process firing. When multiple approval processes exist for the same module, only the first matching process in the list is triggered. If the wrong process is being applied to a record, review the ordering and criteria of your processes in Setup > Process Management. [2]
- Approver not receiving requests. Confirm that the correct user is designated as the approver within the process configuration, and that any associated email alert actions are properly set up. Actions such as sending email notifications must be explicitly associated with each approval process. [2]
- Delegation not used when needed. If the designated approver is unavailable, Zoho CRM allows the approval to be delegated to another user directly from the My Jobs tab — a step that is easy to overlook and can stall records unnecessarily. [2]
What to check
- Confirm the record's current status by visiting My Jobs > Approval Process > Awaiting your Approval to verify it is queued and assigned to the right approver. [2]
- Review Approval History to ensure past decisions have been recorded correctly and that no records were approved or rejected in error. [2]
- Validate process ordering in Setup if you have more than one approval process per module, confirming that criteria and sequence align with your organisation's intended workflow. [2]
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*Beam Help is an independent expert support resource for Zoho products and is not official Zoho support. Always verify configuration changes in a sandbox environment before applying them to your live CRM data.*