Approval Workflow with Admin Review – Google Apps Script

A submission-and-approval system with the boundary drawn in the right place: users can create and correct their own entries, but only an admin can decide what happens to them.

Status belongs to the admin

A user opens their own submission and can edit the details — the name, the activity, the location, the date. What they cannot see is the status control. It is not greyed out or hidden behind a warning; it is not rendered for them at all. The admin, opening the same record, gets Approved, Disapproved and Review. Uploaded files are also locked once submitted, so the evidence attached to a request cannot be quietly swapped after someone has looked at it.

Four queues

Pending, Approved, Disapproved and Review. An admin works the pending list and moves each record into one of the others, with the dashboard counts following. A user sees their own counts on their dashboard — how many of their submissions are waiting, approved or refused — but not the queue itself, so nobody browses other people's requests.

Submitting with evidence

Records carry the activity, location, programme, time and date, plus file attachments. Only images and PDFs are accepted — anything else is refused rather than uploaded and forgotten — and the files land in an assets folder in your Drive.

Accounts

People can register themselves, with a duplicate email refused and a password rule requiring letters and numbers together. Admins manage the user list from inside the app: create, update, delete.

One thing worth knowing before you deploy: once a record is approved, reversing it is done in the sheet rather than in the interface. That is deliberate — an approval is meant to be final — but it is worth telling your admins.