Approved document
An approved document is a version of a policy or procedure that someone with authority has signed off: the version your people follow and the one an auditor reads. In Sted it reads Approved, after Awaiting review and Draft, and stays Approved while a newer draft is prepared, so the version in use never disappears.
Where the term appears
Every ISO management system standard expects documented information to be reviewed and approved before it is issued, kept current, and available to the people who need it, with superseded versions controlled so nobody follows them by mistake. The standards do not name the status; other tools say “in force”, “effective” or “released”. Sted says Approved. The approval and versions page shows how a draft becomes one.
Approved, then followed
Auditors sample a document and check three things: who approved it and when, that the date came before people were expected to follow it, and that people actually work to that version. A draft circulating by email, or a policy whose review date passed with no record of review, is a common finding. Staff awareness counts only against the version they were trained on, which is why a new version asks people to train again.
How Sted uses it
- A document reads Awaiting review until its first review finishes, then Draft, then Approved; it stays Approved while a newer draft is prepared.
- An administrator, or a Policy and Process Owner who owns the document, approves a Draft or starts a new version of an Approved one, and only an administrator assigns a document’s owner; a document still awaiting review cannot be approved.
- Approving sets an effective date and a review date, which starts at the effective date plus the document’s review frequency; a review task opens 30 days before the review date and turns overdue after it.
- Reviewers and Personnel see only approved documents; a Policy and Process Owner sees drafts only of documents they own.
- Training is completed against a specific approved version; a new version asks people to train again.
- Re-issuing training on an unchanged version is not available yet.
Related terms
- Documented information: the ISO term for the documents and records an approved document belongs to.
- Evidence: an approved document is the policy half of it; records are the other half.
- Policy and Process Owner (PPO): the level that approves the documents it owns.
- Standard section: the parts of a document every organisation keeps.
- Document control: the task, step by step.