How to handle bulk approvals in Jira Service Management

Jira Service Management does have approvals built in — a request type can require sign-off before it proceeds. What JSM does not have is a one-click “approve all these at once” button. Approvals are always a per-request decision, so “bulk approvals” in JSM is really a question of clearing them efficiently at volume. Here’s how.

What native JSM approvals give you

• An approval step on a request type’s workflow: the request pauses until an approver approves or declines.
• Approvers act from the customer portal, an email, or the request itself.
• An approver who covers several request types sees all their pending approvals in one portal list — the closest thing to a built-in approval queue.

For a steady trickle of requests that’s usually enough. The pain starts when the queue is long and every item needs an individual click.

Handling approvals at volume

There is no native multi-select approve, so the two real levers are automation and queue hygiene:

1. Auto-approve the routine, review the exceptions. An Automation for Jira rule scoped to the approval step can transition it automatically when a condition is met — a low-risk category, a pre-approved requester, a value under a threshold. Humans then only touch the requests that actually need judgment, which collapses a 50-item queue to the handful that matter.
2. Group your approvers. If any member of an approver group can clear a request, a long queue isn’t blocked on one person being online.
3. Keep the portal approval list tight. Approvers working from their single portal approvals view can move through items quickly in sequence — not one click for the whole batch, but far faster than hunting through email.

Where native approvals stop

Two honest limits are worth knowing before you invest in a workflow:

• No true one-click bulk approve. Even with the portal list, each decision is still recorded per request. Automation is how you get “bulk” behaviour — by removing the need to click at all for the safe cases.
• JSM approvals only exist in service projects. If the work you need signed off lives in a Jira Software project — most engineering, ops and internal teams — JSM’s approvals don’t apply there. Jira Software has its own, separate native approval step, but only on Premium or Enterprise, and even then it has real gaps: no role-based approvers, it bypasses workflow validators, and no field conditions. On Free or Standard, there’s still nothing native at all.

That second gap is a different problem from bulk, and it’s a common surprise. If you need an auditable approve/reject decision on a Jira Software issue — who signed off, the outcome, and why, recorded on the issue, on any plan — that’s exactly what Signet adds: lightweight per-issue approvals and sign-off for plain Jira, without moving work into JSM or upgrading to Premium. It’s a per-issue decision record, not a bulk-JSM tool — so reach for it when your approvals live in Jira Software, and lean on JSM’s native approvals (plus automation) when they live in a service project.

Which approach fits

• Lots of JSM requests, many low-risk? Auto-approve the routine with Automation and review only the exceptions.
• JSM requests that all need a human? Group approvers and work the single portal approvals list.
• Approvals on Jira Software issues? Native JSM approvals don’t reach there, and Jira Software’s own approval step is Premium/Enterprise only with real gaps — that’s the per-issue, any-plan gap Signet fills — see JSM vs Jira Software approvals and the best Jira approval apps.