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Clarification on Accept vs Reject Changes Permissions in Document Properties

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Related to track changes permissions

Hello Workiva Community,

We are looking for some clarification on the behavior of Accept Changes and Reject Changes permissions within Documents.

Under Document Properties, there is a setting that allows us to specify whether changes can be accepted by Owners only or by Owners and Editors. We had assumed that this setting would govern both the ability to accept and reject tracked changes.

However, during testing, we observed that when the setting is configured to Owners only:

  • Editors are correctly prevented from accepting changes.
  • Editors are still able to reject changes.

This was somewhat unexpected, as we anticipated that the permission would apply consistently to both actions.

Could you please confirm whether this is the intended behavior? If so, we would appreciate any insight into the rationale behind treating Accept Changes and Reject Changes differently from a permissions perspective.

We are trying to better understand the design intent and whether there are governance or workflow considerations that led to this distinction.

Thank you in advance for your guidance and insights.

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1 comment

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  • Isabel Messore

    Hi Shradha Harlalka,

    I completely understand where you’re coming from, and I appreciate you raising this—it’s definitely a workflow challenge that our team is actively looking into. After looking into the current behavior, here is how the system is currently designed to operate:

    The "Can Approve Track Changes" setting in Document Properties controls only the ability to accept/approve tracked changes, not reject them.
    - Owners: Can approve and reject any tracked changes.
    - Editors (with Owners Only setting):  Cannot approve tracked changes, but can reject them at any time (one-by-one or for an entire section).
    - Editors (with Editors and Owners setting): Can both approve and reject tracked changes.

    Why the Distinction?
    The ability to restrict rejection is not currently configurable as there is no setting to limit rejecting changes to Owners only. The separation exists because:
    - Approving a change is considered a higher-stakes action (it finalizes a change).
    - Rejecting is treated as a more broadly available action, which Workiva has kept open to Editors by default.
     
    Because optimizing this control is important for workflows like yours, I’ve gone ahead and added your feedback to the active feature request with our Product Team to help prioritize a solution!
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