As my company's contracts manager, I only use the approval workflow to get leadership approval for non-standard contracts. For standard contracts and non-standard contracts that have terms our leadership team has given me pre-approval to accept, I push those through and approve myself (we are both in the approval group for this reason). However, our approver still gets all of these emails and with high volume sales it can be a lot in the inbox. Since approval workflow is set at the template level, there is no work around for this.

It would be great if the Admin (Owner) or other users/roles they designate could bypass the approval process. For the sake of documentation, it would also be ideal if the Admin (Owner) could designate which conditions are met that are allowing the approval to be bypassed - from a custom drop down of various pre-approvals that can be set ahead of time.

To be able to changed the status of a document that has an APPROVED status to COMPLETED even without sending it. The document just needs to be approved by the approver then change the document to completed.

For example, if the approver has left the company, or is out of the office and unable to approve the document and it needs to be approved immediately.

This would be an outstanding feature to enable. Suppose a document has been drafted and an approver is unexpectedly called away from the office. In that case, there is no option to correct it at the document level, requiring that the entire document be re-drafted in a template with an alternate approval workflow. This is both time-consuming and cumbersome for our team.

We especially have the issue in the case someone leaves the company.
A better solution to this would therefore be to have a central approval group manager module.

The main problem for us is that an approver is hardcoded into any document created from a template with an approval flow.

Even though we update the template, that user will still be the only one able to approve the document.

With a central approval group manager (like the role manager in PandaDoc) you'd be able to create and manage groups for all documents where the approval groups have been applied to.

And when something changes - like if someone leaves the company, you won't have to update the approval flow on all templates individually.

Ideally, if on vacation, to have the settings allow the temp-approver to be assigned from "x" date to "x" date.