Approvals — items, rooms, and approving from a mood board

Mortar has two separate layers of "approval," and it's worth knowing which is which.

Item approval (the one that drives budget)

Every item moves through: Draft → Proposed → Approved / Declined.

• You move an item from Draft to Proposed yourself, from its action menu — this is what makes it visible to the client (if its Include toggle is on) and what makes it start counting toward the budget.
• From there, either you or the client can mark it Approved or Declined:
  • You: from the item's action menu in Room Details ("Mark approved" / "Mark declined").
  • The client: from the portal, or by tapping an item on a shared mood board (see below).
• An approved or declined item can be moved back to Proposed if a decision needs revisiting.

This is the status that matters for your budget totals — see How budgets and margin work.

Room approval (a separate, designer-only status)

Each room also carries its own approval status — In progress / In review / Approved — set by you from the room card's status pill on the Rooms & Zones screen. This is a workflow marker you control, not something computed from the items inside it, and it's independent of the room's budget-health colour and of individual item statuses. A room can show "Approved" while it still has items sitting in Proposed.

We haven't confirmed whether room approval status is visible to clients in the portal today — don't promise that to a client until it's confirmed.

Approving from a shared mood board

If you've shared a mood board with a client, item-linked elements on it show a status badge. The client taps one, sees the item's name (and price, if that link's visibility setting shows prices), and chooses Approve, Not for me, or leaves a comment — right there on the board.

This uses the exact same approval action as approving an item from the room's item list — the room's approved count updates immediately either way. There's currently no way to undo an approval from the board itself.

FAQ

If a client approves an item on a mood board, does it show as approved in Room Details too? Yes — it's the same underlying approval, wherever it's triggered from.

Can I require the client to approve before an item counts toward budget? No — an item counts toward budget once it's Proposed, regardless of whether it's been approved or declined yet. Approval is feedback on a proposed selection, not a budget gate.

What's the difference between an item being "Declined" and just deleting it? Declining keeps the item and its history in the room, just marked as not chosen — useful if you want a record of what the client rejected. Deleting removes it (see Room Details for the current caveats on deletion).