Teams In Approval Workflows¶

Teams in Preloop are reusable groups of users. They matter in three places:

membership and organization inside your account
inherited RBAC roles for users
approval workflow routing when a workflow should notify a group instead of a single person

Availability

Teams, team-based workflows and multi-user quorum behavior are Enterprise features.

How The Data Model Fits Together¶

Use this mental model when configuring teams:

flowchart LR
    Users[Users] --> Teams[Teams]
    Teams --> TeamRoles[Team Roles]
    Users --> DirectRoles[Direct Roles]
    Teams --> ApprovalWorkflows[Approval Workflows]
    Users --> ApprovalWorkflows
    ApprovalWorkflows --> Policies[Tool Policies And Access Rules]

Key points:

Users can have direct roles.
Users can also inherit permissions through team roles.
Invitations can automatically add a new user to one or more teams.
Approval workflows can include users, teams, or both as approvers.
The quorum belongs to the approval workflow, not to the team.

Creating And Managing Teams¶

Go to Settings → Teams.

The current team UI supports:

creating a team with Team Name and Description
editing that basic metadata later
opening a Team Members modal to add or remove members
opening Manage Team Roles to assign RBAC roles to the team

Team Management page in Preloop — The Teams page is a lightweight management surface for team metadata, members, and team roles.

That means teams are intentionally lightweight. They do not currently have their own:

notification channel settings
team-level quorum settings
team hierarchy
on-call rotation
analytics dashboard
workflow stages or delegation rules

Recommended Team Structure¶

Create teams that match real approval or permission boundaries, for example:

Support
Finance
SRE
Security
Platform

Keep team names stable so they remain meaningful when reused in multiple approval workflows.

Members, Roles, And Invitations¶

Team Members¶

Members are managed after the team is created.

From Team Members you can:

review the current member list
add a user to the team
remove a user from the team

Team Members modal in Preloop — Members are managed from the Team Members modal after the team already exists.

Team Roles¶

Team roles are RBAC roles assigned to the team itself. Every user on that team inherits those permissions.

This is why the Users page shows both:

Direct Roles
Inherited Roles

Use team roles when you want a permission change to apply to a group instead of managing each user individually.

Manage Team Roles modal in Preloop — Team roles are RBAC roles assigned to the team, then inherited by each member.

User Management page showing direct and inherited roles — The Users page shows the difference between direct roles and roles inherited through teams.

Invitations¶

From Settings → Invitations, you can invite a user by email and optionally pre-select the teams they should join after accepting the invitation.

This is useful for onboarding because it lets you:

invite the user once
place them into the right teams immediately
give them inherited permissions through those teams

Send Invitation modal with optional teams — Invitations can pre-assign a new user to one or more teams during onboarding.

Using Teams In Approval Workflows¶

Teams become powerful when you use them as approver groups.

An approval workflow can include:

specific users
one or more teams
or a mix of both

Example: Single Team Approver¶

If a workflow uses the Support team with Approvals Required = 1, any one eligible member of that team can approve the request.

Example: Team Plus Quorum¶

If a workflow uses the Finance team with Approvals Required = 2, the request is routed to the workflow's approver pool and two approvals are needed before execution continues.

Example: Mixed Approvers¶

A workflow can combine:

the Finance team
one named CFO user
one named legal approver

Preloop then counts approvals across that configured approver set.

How Quorum Actually Works¶

Quorum in Preloop is a single workflow-level integer: Approvals Required.

That means:

quorum is defined on the workflow
quorum is counted across the workflow's approver pool
the team itself does not carry its own quorum rule

For example:

Approvers: Finance Team + cto@company.com
Approvals Required: 2

This means any two valid approvals across that combined set satisfy the workflow.

Notifications: User-Level, Not Team-Level¶

Notification delivery is configured primarily per user.

That means:

users receive email and mobile notifications based on their own settings
workflow-level Slack / Mattermost / webhook integrations belong to the workflow configuration
teams themselves do not have a dedicated notification-settings page

So the right mental model is:

team = who belongs together
workflow = who should be asked
user notification preferences = how each person gets notified

For notification-channel details, see Multi-Channel Notifications.

Good Patterns¶

Pattern 1: Functional Approver Group¶

Use a team like Support or Finance as the approver group for a workflow that many tools share.

Pattern 2: Group Permissions Plus Workflow Routing¶

Assign the team a role for the permissions they need in the console, then reuse the same team inside approval workflows.

Pattern 3: Multiple Teams, One Workflow¶

Use multiple teams in a single workflow when more than one group is allowed to respond and a shared quorum is sufficient.