I’m just starting with Zapier and need help with creating a manual review step in my automation. My workflow starts when Otter.ai creates a new meeting recording summary. The goal is to automatically save these summaries to our company knowledge database for our chatbot system.
The problem is I need someone to manually check each summary before it gets added to the database. This is important because some meetings might have sensitive information that shouldn’t be shared with everyone in the company.
I was thinking about sending approval requests through email or Slack messages. But I’m stuck on how to handle the response. When someone approves or rejects the request, I think I need to create a separate Zapier workflow that triggers when they respond. The tricky part is connecting these two workflows together so the second one knows which meeting summary to process.
Is there a way to pass information between different Zapier workflows? Or maybe there’s a better approach I’m missing?
UPDATE: Found out Slack has a built-in approval action in Zapier. It only works in channels (not direct messages) but you can choose who can approve. This solution works for what I need!
Here’s another option: use Google Sheets or Airtable as a middleman. Your first workflow dumps the summary data into a spreadsheet with a “pending review” status column. Then trigger your second workflow when that status flips to “approved.” You get a clean audit trail and can easily see what’s waiting for review. The reviewer just updates the status in the sheet directly, or you can build a simple web form to do it. I’ve used this setup for several approval workflows and it’s way more reliable than trying to parse email responses.
nice find with slack! if u need more flexiblity, webhooks are the way to go. u can send data from the first zap to a webhook that triggers the second one. this is awesome for more complex workflows!
Google Sheets works fine, but Zapier’s built-in storage keeps everything in one place. Store your meeting data from the first workflow using Storage by Zapier, then grab it back in your approval workflow. Just make sure you create a unique ID for each summary so you can match them later. I’ve been doing this with document approvals for 6 months. I generate a timestamp ID in the first workflow, store all the meeting data with that ID, then stick the ID in my approval request. When someone approves, the second workflow uses that ID to pull the original data and finish everything up.