Freshservice moves approvals in December: review workflows now

What Freshworks changed on 2 November

On 2 November 2026 Freshworks revised two Freshservice support notices. Together they set firm dates for the way approvals work in the product. The groups and chains in approvals notice says legacy approvals will be retired in batches. Pro plan accounts move between 1 and 9 December 2026, and Enterprise plan accounts move between 10 and 17 December 2026. If Freshworks' automated scan finds workflow impact on an account, that account gets until 5 February 2027. The notice states that "No further extensions will be granted beyond 05 February, 2027." To get onto the February list, a customer has to finish its review and contact Freshworks by the end of November 2026.

The second notice covers a Workflow Automator setting called "Unblock subsequent workflows from pending approvals". The deprecation notice originally retired the setting on 5 November 2026, and the 2 November revision extends the migration period through May 2027. Once that period ends, non-blocking execution becomes permanent for event-based workflows, and Freshworks will remove the toggle in a later release.

How approvals behave after the move

Under the new model, an approval group is a set of approvers who decide under a single rule: Everyone, Anyone, Majority or First Responder. An approval chain runs several groups in parallel, and a chain rule decides when the overall approval is complete. The groups and chains notice warns that manual approval requests will no longer merge. Each group's rule also stops being overridden by default, so a request that used to need one approver could end up needing several, or the other way round. Integrations that raise approvals through the Freshservice API will create a separate group for every approver call unless developers switch to the new chain-rule or approval-group endpoints.

The non-blocking change carries more risk for change control. In the old behaviour, a pending approval on one workflow held back every other matching workflow on the same ticket or change. According to the non-blocking execution FAQ, other workflows now proceed as soon as the approval email goes out, and any node placed after an approval may run immediately. Freshworks lists unintended actions among the risks, with workflows firing earlier than expected or in the wrong order.

The notices don't agree on who is affected. The deprecation notice says the change affects every Freshservice account that uses approvals in workflow automation, but it also says the setting is currently offered only to customers who opted into early access. The November 2026 biannual update adds that accounts onboarded after May 2025 already run subsequent workflows while an approval is pending. Freshworks hasn't published a single table matching each account type to a behaviour, so admins should check the setting in their own instance and not rely on what the notices imply.

Why NZ service desks should act this month

In many NZ organisations with lean IT teams, a Freshservice approval is the only control between a request and an automated action. Typical examples are a software licence purchase, access to the finance system or a new starter's laptop order. Suppose a workflow builder assumed provisioning would wait for a manager's sign-off, and a second workflow on the same ticket calls a web request node to create the account. Once non-blocking execution applies, that second workflow can run before anyone has approved. Nobody edits a workflow, yet the control disappears. The service desk may only find out when an auditor asks for evidence of approval before access was granted, or when someone notices a rejected request was fulfilled anyway.

Freshworks' wider business suggests more workflows will share approvals over time. In its third quarter results on 3 November, the company said annual recurring revenue had passed US$1 billion, and chief executive Dennis Woodside said new multi-product employee experience deals grew by more than 35%. As organisations add HR, facilities and asset modules alongside the core service desk, more requests pass through approval logic that someone set up years ago.

Timing makes the December batches awkward for New Zealand teams. The Pro and Enterprise windows overlap the pre-Christmas change freezes many organisations run, and the people who built the workflows may be on summer leave when problems show up. The 5 February 2027 extension deadline is the Friday before the Waitangi Day long weekend, so teams that miss the end-of-November request will lose much of January to the holidays. The same notice says tickets and changes that are already approved won't be affected. It doesn't say what happens to approvals still pending when an account migrates, and admins should ask Freshworks before their batch window opens.

The approval redesign is a good prompt to check whether your change and request controls match your written process. In ITIL 4 terms, the question is whether change enablement depends on documented authorities or on the order a tool happens to run its steps. Our ITIL 4 framework page covers how those practices fit together.

Practical next steps

• List every workflow that contains a "Send approval" action, and mark each node that sits after the approval inside the same workflow.
• For each marked node and each other workflow triggered by the same event, write down what it does, and what goes wrong if it runs before the approval decision or after a rejection.
• Move provisioning, purchasing and access steps behind an explicit approval-outcome condition, or into a workflow that starts only after the approval is granted.
• Check manual approval rules group by group, because requests will stop merging and the most recent rule will no longer override earlier ones by default.
• Ask whoever owns your integrations whether any of them create approvals through the API, and plan the move to the chain-rule or approval-group endpoints.
• Test in a sandbox that's on the current version. The biannual update says older Sandbox versions were detached from sync after 5 November 2026 and detached sandboxes are deleted automatically. Freshworks also configures Sandbox and Production separately.
• If you find any impact, contact Freshworks before 30 November 2026 to get onto the February 2027 list, and keep a written record of the request.
• Tell approvers before your batch date that group rules may change who must respond, and keep screenshots of the old and new configurations for audit evidence.

Teams that want to redesign approval flows instead of patching them can find our approach on the process and automation page.