# Reviewing, approving, and signing off

**Category:** [RFP Responses](https://help.totalctrl.app/hc/totalctrl/totalctrl-help-center/en-US/categories/rfp-responses)
**Updated:** 2026-10-04

## Approving an answer

Approving does three things: it records who approved it and when, it moves the question to **Approved**, and it saves the answer to your library for reuse.

A question with no answer cannot be approved. Approving nothing is how a blank reaches a buyer with a reviewer's name on it.
## Signing off the response

Sign-off is a person accepting the response as a whole, and it is recorded separately from the per-question approvals.
### Signing off with questions outstanding

If some questions are not approved, sign-off asks you for a reason before it proceeds. It is not a trick question and it does not block you — teams genuinely do send a questionnaire with three items outstanding because the deadline is in an hour, and an app that pretended otherwise would just get worked around.

What matters is that the record says so afterwards. The reason is stored on the response, shown on the page, and written to the audit log, so a post-mortem can see that you shipped with three unanswered and why.
### Submitted is a separate step

Marking a response **Submitted** is deliberately not the same action as signing off. Internal approval and actually sending it to the buyer are usually different days, and collapsing them loses that gap.

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## Related Articles

- [Limits, plans, and boosters](https://help.totalctrl.app/en-US/articles/rfp-limits)
- [Exporting your answers](https://help.totalctrl.app/en-US/articles/rfp-export)
- [Where answers come from](https://help.totalctrl.app/en-US/articles/rfp-drafting)
- [Importing answers from past questionnaires](https://help.totalctrl.app/en-US/articles/rfp-import-past)
- [The answer library](https://help.totalctrl.app/en-US/articles/rfp-answer-library)

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