Frequently Asked Questions
Below are answers to the most common questions.
Subscriptions can be purchased via our subscription page.
For subscription-related questions, please refer to the frequently asked questions at the bottom of our pricing page, or email our support team at support@formapprovals.com.
You can transfer forms from your My Forms dashboard, or manually from within Google Forms. In both cases, you need to prepare your Google files first.
- Share the Google Form with the new administrator;
- Share the Google Sheet that is linked to your form. This can be accessed from the 'Responses' tab of your Google Form;
- If you have a File Upload question in your form, share the folder that stores file uploads;
- If you set up the add-on to generate PDFs from an attachment template, share the attachment template(s).
In all cases we recommend giving the new administrator owner level access. Editor level access can be problematic if the owner's account is ever closed.
- Make sure the new administrator has installed the add-on.
- Go to your My Forms dashboard and use Transfer Form or Transfer All Forms from the Actions menu.
- The new administrator opens the Google Form and opens the add-on from the sidebar. If prompted with a warning about the previous admin, click 'Ok' to proceed. Then click Settings, then Account, then toggle the add-on ON.
- If the form uses attachment templates: from the add-on sidebar, click Settings, then Email Editor, then click Other > and re-add the template(s). This is required so the add-on can access the templates from their account.
These steps need to be done for each form that is connected to the add-on.
If you have a paid subscription with us, also make sure to transfer / update your subscription.
First, follow the steps above to share your Google files and transfer your forms.
If you own a paid Individual subscription: go to your Subscription page, scroll to the Transfer Subscription section, and enter the new user's email address. You can optionally check Also transfer all my forms to transfer your forms and subscription together. The new user will receive an email notification with details of the transfer.
If you own a paid Team subscription: simply add the new administrator to your Team, by following the steps on this support article.
If a form is showing as Inactive, it means the add-on is not processing submissions for that form. You can re-activate it from within Google Forms.
- Open the Google Form that you want to re-activate.
- Open the Form Approvals add-on from the puzzle piece icon in the toolbar.
- Click Settings, then click Account.
- Toggle the add-on ON.
Once activated, the add-on will resume processing new submissions for that form. If you continue to experience issues, refer to our troubleshooting guide.
The timezone is taken from the settings of the spreadsheet that is linked to your Google Form. To change the timezone, refer to this Google support article.
Users can also change the language of email notifications. To change the language, update the language (locale) in your spreadsheet settings. Refer to this Google support article for how to change the locale. The add-on will translate the items on email notifications that are not customizable using the Email Editor. Use the Email Editor to then change the remaining content as you require. Learn more about personalizing notifications using the Email Editor.
- To notify the requestor when the workflow is complete (i.e., approved by all recipients) or ends early (i.e., declined, cancelled, or more info is requested), simply enable 'Collect email addresses' in your Google Form settings. When this is enabled, the add-on will automatically notify the requestor.
- To notify all recipients when the workflow is complete, enable 'Notify recipients when complete' within the 'Settings' tab of the add-on.
- To notify recipients when the workflow ends early, enable 'Notify recipients when ends early' within the 'Settings' tab of the add-on. This will notify any recipient(s) who the add-on is currently awaiting a response from, recipient(s) that have already responded, and recipient(s) with the 'Receives a Copy' role type.
- To notify specific recipients when the workflow is complete, add a new recipient, then change the role type to 'Receives a Copy', then set the receiving order to the last level of the workflow. For example, if you have a workflow already set up with one recipient, set the receiving order of the new recipient to 2.
Within our documentation, we refer to 'requestor' and 'recipient' quite often:
- The requestor is the person completing the form submission (initiating the request).
- The recipient is the person receiving and responding to the request. The recipient may have one of the following roles: 'Needs to Approve', 'Needs to Sign', 'Needs to Recommend', 'Needs to Acknowledge', 'Needs to Action', 'Needs to Edit' or 'Receives a Copy'. Learn more about recipient role types.
Recipients are not required to have a Google account, nor are they required to install anything. Each time a submission is made on your form, an email is sent to your recipients with a unique link to respond directly from their email without having to log in.
In addition, unlike other add-ons, recipients are not required to have access to your Google Form or linked Google Sheet.
- Requestor Confirmation - If 'Collect email addresses' is enabled in your Google Form settings, the person submitting the request will receive a notification confirming receipt of their request.
- Recipient Notification - each time a form submission is made, the first recipient(s) will receive a notification with details of the request and links to action the request. Once they have responded, a notification will be sent to the second recipient (if any), and so on.
- Complete / Declined / More Info Required / Cancelled - These notifications state the outcome of the request and are sent to the requestor if 'Collect email addresses' is enabled in your Google Form settings. These notifications will also be sent to recipients with role 'Receives a Copy' if they are in the final position of the workflow. See How do I notify users when the workflow is complete? for more information.
Each notification type can be personalized. For further details, refer to this support article.
If a recipient has incorrectly responded to a request or you have changed your workflow settings and need a request to re-route based on your new settings, you can restart a workflow request from the beginning by following these steps:
- Open your Google Form
- In your Google Form settings, make sure you have Collect email addresses set to Responder Input and Allow response editing enabled. These settings can be changed back after the next steps have been completed.
- From your Google Form, click the Responses tab
- Click the small green spreadsheet icon to open the spreadsheet
- Within the spreadsheet, go to the Detailed Approval Records tab
- Locate the Request # that you want to reset
- Click on the Edit Response URL from column G
- Click through and re-submit the request.
This process will restart the workflow from the beginning.
To allow edits, enable Allow response editing in your Google Form settings.
When an edit is made, the add-on will restart the workflow, sending the request back to the first recipient. The add-on does this to maintain the integrity of the process, ensuring requestors cannot change the request without it having to be re-approved. When the workflow restarts, the add-on will increment the Revision # (e.g., Request #5 will become Request #5/1, where 1 represents the revision number).
If you would like a recipient to edit the request as part of the workflow, read on.
To allow recipients to edit the request, the add-on provides two choices:
- Add a recipient to your workflow and change their role to "Needs to Edit". The add-on will send them the request with a link to edit the form submission. When edited, the add-on will proceed to the next step in your workflow; or
- Personalize the notifications by adding the <<Edit Response URL>> marker to the Recipient notification type or to a private message. When edited, the add-on will accept the edit, but not proceed to the next step of the workflow until they have also performed the action associated with their role (like Approve, Action, Recommend, etc.). This allows the recipient to both edit the form response and perform an action.
It is important to note that Google Forms does not provide add-ons any information about who made the edit, so when allowing recipients to edit, the add-on changes the way it handles an edit:
- If you have a recipient in your workflow with the role type Needs to Edit and the request is currently awaiting their response, the add-on will accept the edit and proceed to the next recipient (i.e., it will not restart the workflow).
- If you have a recipient in your workflow with the role type Needs to Edit and the request is awaiting the response of any other recipient, the add-on will assume the edit was made by the requestor and will restart the workflow.
- If you include the <<Edit Response URL>> marker in the Recipient notification template, or within a private message of any recipient, the add-on will not restart the workflow when an edit is made and the Overall Status of the request is 'In progress' or 'Complete'.
Common error messages include:
- We're sorry, a server error occurred. Please wait a bit and try again.
- drive.google.com refused to connect
- You need permission (to access a file)
- Something isn't quite right, please try again in a few minutes.
- There was a problem: The add-on does not have sufficient authorization to run
- ScriptError: Authorization is required to perform that action
- Error: Logged in with multiple Google accounts. Sign in with one account only.
Refer to our troubleshooting support article for guidance on how to avoid the above errors.
We recommend the add-on administrator sets up the add-on using a Google account that has Google Mail enabled. It's not an issue if you don't, however since Google add-ons run and send emails from your Google account, you will be required to purchase the Mail option (send emails from the formapprovals.com domain) when subscribing to one of our paid plans. If you would like to trial the service with emails being sent from formapprovals.com before purchasing a subscription, email support@formapprovals.com