Introducing Approval Flows for Filament

Every business app eventually grows a question mark in its workflow: who signs off on this? A purchase order over a threshold. A refund. A published article. A new vendor. The moment more than one person needs to say "yes", you're building an approval chain — and if you've done it once, you know it rarely stays simple.

We built Approval Flows so you don't have to build that state machine again.

What it is

Approval Flows is a premium Filament plugin that gates any Eloquent model behind a chain of sign-off steps. Add a trait, define a flow, call submitForApproval() — and your approvers get a ready-made inbox, notifications, and a full audit trail.

It runs on Filament v4 and v5 from a single package, on PHP 8.2+.

The parts that usually hurt

Rolling your own approval logic means solving the same handful of problems every time. Approval Flows solves them once:

• Sequential and parallel steps. A step passes when any assigned approver signs, or when all of them do — your choice, per step.
• Approvers that aren't hard-coded. Point a step at a spatie/laravel-permission role or at specific users. Need org-chart logic? Drop in your own resolver.
• Delegation. Someone's on holiday? They hand the step to a deputy, and the audit trail records it.
• Escalation. A step that sits too long re-notifies and fires an event, on a schedule you control.
• An inbox, for free. A panel page listing exactly what the signed-in user can act on, with a badge count.

Nothing touches your model's table. Approval state lives in the plugin's tables; you react to events like ApprovalCompleted to run your own side effects.

Three lines to wire up

use Talivio\ApprovalFlows\Concerns\HasApprovals;

class PurchaseOrder extends Model
{
    use HasApprovals;
}

$po->submitForApproval();

Define the flow in a seeder or straight from the bundled admin resource — no code deploy to change a chain later.

Try it now

We put up a live demo: click through a real Purchase Order approval as a submitter, a manager, or finance, with one tap each. It resets every hour, so poke at it freely.

When you're ready, the docs walk you from install to your first completed approval in a few minutes.

Approval Flows is the first of Talivio's plugins for Filament — battle-tested premium plugins for your panels. More to come.