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Access requests

Request flows users actually complete.

Each Resource has its own intake Form and approval routing, including Function-backed decisions. Configure staged chains with ALL, ANY, or N-of-M quorum and manager fallback. Users can track requests, approve, reassign, or cancel from the end-user dashboard, with evidence recorded at every step.

Lifecycle

Submission to evidence, in one record.

Submission, routing, approval, fulfillment, and evidence all contribute to the same request record.

  1. 01

    Submission.

    A user picks a Resource from a catalog scoped to what they can request, fills its custom Form with text, pickers, or governed file-upload fields, and submits.

  2. 02

    Routing.

    Owlie resolves the approval path from the Resource’s configured policy — a specific user, a group, the beneficiary’s manager (with configurable fallback), or a Function that decides dynamically.

  3. 03

    Approval.

    The approver sees who needs access, what they requested and why, the applicable policy, and the other approvers. They can approve, reject, or reassign.

  4. 04

    Fulfillment.

    On final approval, the request hands off to provisioning. The same pipeline handles automated connectors, manual tickets, Functions, and virtual fulfillment.

  5. 05

    Evidence.

    The request settles with a full trail: submission, approval chain, fulfillment steps, outcome. Auditable as one record.

Approval patterns

The decision models your policy actually uses.

Each Resource carries its own approval policy, using the patterns below.

Named approver
Single user owns the decision.
Group approval
Any member of a group can approve. First response wins.
Manager approval
Routes to the beneficiary’s manager, with configurable fallback when the manager record is missing or invalid.
Policy-driven
A Function decides: auto-approve, auto-reject, or hand the decision to a specific user or group based on the request’s shape.

Break-glass

Urgent access with retroactive approval.

Some access can’t wait for a chain to clear. On a Resource configured for it, a request whose beneficiary already holds a ratified grant can move to fulfillment while a frozen copy of the approval flow runs behind it as retroactive ratification — the approvers still see the request, still decide, and their queue marks it as access that is already live. A Resource marked eligible for break-glass can extend that to a first-time grant, optionally only for named beneficiary groups, and forces a short access window on top: the tightest cap wins, and the grant expires on its own.

Blocking policies still park the request in every mode, eligibility is a property of the individual Resource rather than a tenant-wide switch, and the request stays in progress until both fulfillment and ratification have settled. If ratification rejects, the grant that was already fulfilled is revoked through the same provisioning pipeline that created it, and a configurable cooldown holds that beneficiary out of the optimistic path for that Resource. Break-glass eligibility does not waive the cooldown. A successful break-glass grant can also open a post-hoc certification for the Resource owner to review independently, and its grant, revocation, and expiry notifications are not suppressed as machine noise. The record carries both halves: what was granted, and what the approvers decided afterwards. Requests that don’t qualify take the standard route.

Chains and delegation

Multi-step approval that doesn’t restart on a snag.

A stage advances only once its quorum is met — one approver, everyone, or N-of-M, with multiple approvers acting in parallel inside the same stage. By default, a rejection stops the chain the moment it makes that quorum unreachable — immediate for a single-approver or all-must-approve stage — though an N-of-M stage can be set to fail on the first rejection instead. Manager-based stages fall back to a named user or group when the beneficiary has no manager record. Policy-driven stages can reassign dynamically, and a reassignment keeps the current stage open under the new assignee rather than advancing the chain. Later stages wait until the current stage resolves.

A delegate configured on an approver’s identity, for a vacation window or as a standing assistant, receives notifications and can decide that approver’s pending approvals. Nothing is reassigned: the ticket stays with the accountable approver, both people can act on it, and every delegated decision records who actually made it and the delegation it was made under.

Vacation window
A start and end date on the approver’s identity. The delegate can act inside the window and not outside it.
Standing assistant
No end date. An assistant works the day-to-day approvals while the approver keeps their own queue.
Pending work only
Open tickets assigned to that person. Group queues and already-decided tickets are never delegated.
One hop, duties separated
A delegate can’t re-delegate, and can’t decide work where they are the requester or the beneficiary.

Notifications

Notifications follow status changes.

Request and approval notifications move through one governed pipeline: a typed catalog — request submitted, approved, denied, fulfilled, canceled; ticket assigned — resolved against per-tenant channel policy and each person’s own preferences, over email, in-app, and Slack — where an approver can approve, deny, or reassign in the message itself. Every delivery is tracked per recipient and channel, retried on a backoff, and dead-lettered if it never lands rather than silently dropped. Repeated emissions of the same event collapse to a single message, and a failed notification never changes the state of the request that triggered it.

Request flows shaped to your policy.

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