Workflow

Approval Decisions Without Evidence

Someone approved the vendor contract. Someone else reviewed the insurance renewal. A third person signed off on the new subsidiary formation. But when an auditor asks who authorized these decisions — and when — the answers live in email threads, chat messages, and the memories of people who may have moved on.

For compliance decisions that don’t produce a formal document, there’s no structured record that the decision happened at all. The approval happened. The proof didn’t. Lextree’s compliance workflow feature captures every multi-step approval in a structured, auditable record. Every action lands in an immutable activity stream that answers “who approved this and when?” — without reconstruction.

Permanent Activity Stream

Attach a workflow to any record in any module — a contract renewal, an insurance policy review, a vendor qualification, a board resolution. The activity stream records every action: status changes, checklist completions, comments, user assignments. Each entry captures who acted and when. Nothing disappears.

When an auditor asks whether the contract renewal was properly authorized, the audit trail shows the complete history. Who created the workflow. Who checked each approval step. Who changed the status to completed. Every comment and file attached along the way.

Flexible Process, Fixed Evidence

The workflow adapts to how work actually happens. Delegate when someone is unavailable. Skip steps in urgent situations. Add requirements mid-process. The activity stream documents exactly what happened, regardless of how the process unfolded.

This separation is deliberate. Statuses can change, items can be added or removed, assignments can shift. But the record of each change is permanent — preserving the evidence trail through every exception and course correction.

Checklists That Document Reality

Compliance processes rarely follow a rigid script. Someone is unavailable and a colleague steps in. An urgent situation requires skipping ahead. A new requirement surfaces mid-process. Enforced sequencing — where step two locks until step one completes — breaks down in these scenarios.

Lextree takes a different approach. Checklist items define the steps — “Legal Review,” “Finance Approval,” “Executive Sign-off” — with individual assignments and due dates. Any participant can check any item at any time. When Sally Jones checks “Finance Approval,” the activity stream records it with a timestamp.

Each item carries its own structured data: reviewer assessments, approval conditions, completion notes. Items have individual due dates and file attachments, making each step self-documenting.

Templates for Recurring Processes

Reusable Workflow Patterns

Contract renewals follow the same steps every time. Vendor qualifications require the same reviews. Insurance policy approvals need the same sign-offs. Rebuilding these compliance workflows from scratch wastes time and invites inconsistency.

Workflow templates define reusable patterns: a standard checklist, default assignees, structured data fields, and reference documents. Create a workflow from a template and every aspect stays fully editable — the template is a starting point, not a constraint.

Automated Suggestions

Templates can suggest workflows based on a schedule or a date field. Lextree surfaces these suggestions at the right time:

• Schedule triggers: “Quarterly compliance review workflows are ready for creation” — one per entity, suggested at the start of each quarter
• Date field triggers: “Contract renewal workflow suggested for Acme Services Agreement” — triggered 180 days before expiration

These are suggestions, not automatic actions. You review each one and decide whether to create the workflow, dismiss it, or handle it differently.

Approve Before You Create

Some approval workflows exist to authorize something that doesn’t exist yet. A new contract needs legal and finance sign-off before entry into the system. A new vendor relationship requires qualification before the vendor record is created. A new subsidiary formation needs board authorization before registration.

Lextree supports these “create record” workflows natively. A template specifies which record type it creates and which relationships the new record needs. When participants complete the workflow, a “Create Record” button pre-populates all relationships from the workflow.

The workflow and record maintain a bidirectional link — full traceability from approval to result. This eliminates a common compliance gap: records without documented approval, or approvals that never produce a record.

One View, Every Module

Unified Dashboard

Workflows attach to records in any module. A single person might participate in approval workflows across contracts, insurance, vendor management, entity formation, and governance simultaneously. Lextree’s workflow dashboard shows all your active workflows in one place, regardless of module.

Filter by status, due date, module, or entity. Surface stale workflows that lack recent activity. Identify overdue items before they become compliance gaps. The dashboard also flags orphan patterns: approved workflows that never produced a record, or records that exist without a completed workflow.

Connected Platform Features

Workflow connects to other Lextree platform features for a complete compliance picture.

Due dates integrate with Events. Set a due date on a workflow or checklist item, and automatic reminders arrive 7, 3, and 1 day before the deadline. Sync these deadlines to external calendar applications through the iCal feed.

Completion drives Timeline entries. When an approval workflow reaches completed status, the record’s timeline reflects the new state — “approved” with a link to the authorizing workflow. The timeline shows when the state changed; the linked workflow shows the full deliberation history.