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Queue approval: review and approve prints before they run

Queue approval: review and approve prints before they run


Queue approval puts a review step between a user submitting a print and that print reaching a live printer. When it's on, a submitted item lands in a pending approval lane, and an approver checks it, sees the cost and what it will use, then approves, denies, or sends it back. It's built for classrooms and shared labs where a teacher or lab manager wants the final say before filament gets spent. This article is part of the print queue.


Queue approval is available on the School and Enterprise plans. The Print Farm plan does NOT include it, even though it includes the print queue itself. If you want approval, you'll need School or Enterprise.


In this article


When approval makes sense

Approval is for shared environments where you want a human to sign off before a print starts. In a classroom, a teacher can confirm a student's model is sliced correctly and won't waste a spool. In a makerspace or university lab, a lab manager can keep an eye on cost before jobs hit the machines. The point is control: nothing a restricted user submits prints until someone with approval rights says yes.


It pairs naturally with two other School and Enterprise tools. Quotas cap how much each user can print over a period, and balances charge prints against prepaid credit. Approval is the manual gate on top of those automatic limits, so an approver sees the exact cost and the submitter's current usage before deciding. See the quotas and limits article and the user balance article for those.


Turn on queue approval

Queue approval is an account-wide setting that an organization admin turns on, then tunes per group. You'll find it under Settings > Queue (/panel/settings/queue), in the approval section.


From there you can:


  • Enable approval for the account.
  • Require approval by default for all groups, so every queue group inherits "approval required" unless you override it.
  • Set the queue position after approval (covered below).
  • Choose whether to notify approvers when something is waiting, and whether to notify the submitter when their item is decided.
  • Choose whether to show the approver's name to the submitter.


Turning approval on doesn't force it on every item by itself. Whether a given submission needs approval depends on the group it goes into and the submitter's rank, which is what the per-group policy controls.


Set the approval policy per group

Approval is decided per queue group. Each group has an approval policy in its editor, and it can follow the account default or override it.


The policy options are:


  • Use default - the group follows whatever the account-wide setting is.
  • Always require - every submission into this group needs approval, regardless of the account default.
  • Never require - submissions into this group skip approval, even if the default requires it.


On top of the policy you can set:


  • Required ranks - the user ranks whose submissions into this group must be approved.
  • Exempt ranks - ranks whose submissions into this group are waved through without approval.


So a "student work" group might be set to always require approval with students as a required rank, while a "staff prototypes" group is set to never require it. An item only goes through approval when its group's policy says so and the submitter's rank isn't exempt.


The pending approval lane

When a submission needs approval, it does not enter the live queue. Instead it lands in a pending approval lane, where it waits for a decision. It won't be picked up by 1-Click Print or AutoPrint and won't be assigned to a printer until it's approved.


Approvers see what's waiting in two places:


  • The approval table on the queue page, listing every pending item with its status, file name, amount, its submitter, the group, print time, filament, printer, tags, and when it was submitted. This is the universal approval surface, available on both the School and Enterprise plans.
  • The teacher dashboard widget, which surfaces pending items for staff who live on the dashboard rather than the queue page. The dashboard widget is a School-plan surface.


From either spot you open an item to review it.


The review modal

Opening a pending item brings up the review modal, which gives an approver everything needed to make a call without leaving the page. It shows:


  • A 3D / gcode preview of the file, so you can see what's actually being printed.
  • The print time, filament usage, and cost from the file's analysis.
  • The submitter's quota usage - shown on the queue's user/quota column, where this user stands against their limits or balance right now, so you can see whether approving this print pushes them over.
  • A comments thread, so the approver and submitter can talk it through. A teacher can ask a student to fix an orientation or explain a large job, and the back-and-forth stays attached to the item.


This is the same analysis you'd see on a normal queue item, focused into a single decision view.


Approve, deny, send back, or print and approve

From the review modal you have four actions:


  • Approve - the item is accepted and moves into the live queue (see the next section for where it lands).
  • Deny - the item is rejected. You add a reason so the submitter knows why, and you can optionally remove the item at the same time instead of leaving it sitting denied.
  • Send back for revision - the item goes back to the submitter to fix and resubmit, rather than being approved or denied outright. Use this when the print is close but needs a change, paired with a note in the comments.
  • Print and approve - approve the item and start it printing in one step, for when you're at the machine and want it running immediately.


Deny reasons and the comments thread mean a submitter always has context for a decision, which cuts down on "why didn't my print run?" questions.


Where an approved item lands in the queue

When you approve an item, it enters the live queue at the position set by the queue position after approval setting under Settings > Queue. You choose how approved items slot in:


  • Submission time - the item takes the place it would have had if it had gone straight into the queue when the user first submitted it, so users who submitted earlier aren't pushed behind later approvals.
  • Top - approved items go to the front, useful when approval is the bottleneck and you want approved work to run next.
  • Bottom - approved items go to the back, behind everything already queued.


Once it's in the live queue it behaves like any other item and is picked up according to your scheduling and distribution settings.


Notifications and the approver name

Two notification toggles keep everyone in the loop, set under Settings > Queue:


  • Notify approvers - approvers are told when an item is waiting, so a teacher doesn't have to keep refreshing the queue to catch new submissions.
  • Notify submitter - the submitter is told when their item is approved, denied, or sent back, so they know the outcome without asking.


The show approver name setting controls whether the submitter sees who decided their item. Turn it on if you want students to know which teacher approved or denied a job; turn it off if you'd rather keep decisions anonymous.


Letting some ranks skip approval

Not everyone should sit behind the gate. Approval is skipped for a submitter in two ways:


  • Exempt ranks on the group - as covered above, a group's policy can name ranks whose submissions don't need approval.
  • The per-rank skip-approval permission - the queue_skip_approval permission lets a whole rank bypass approval everywhere. Give it to teachers, lab managers, or admins so their own prints go straight to the queue while students stay gated.


Between the group policy and the rank permission, you can set up a typical classroom in a couple of minutes: students require approval, staff bypass it.


What approval does not do

A few things people expect that approval does not do, so you can plan around them:


  • There is no auto-approve by cost, size, or material. Approval is a manual decision or a rank exemption; there's no rule that auto-approves anything under a certain cost or auto-denies anything over it.
  • There is no approval expiry or auto-deny. A pending item waits until someone decides on it; it won't time out or reject itself after a while.


The only automatic bypass is rank exemption (a group's exempt ranks or the per-rank skip-approval permission). Everything else is a deliberate approve, deny, send back, or print and approve.


For help rolling this out across a district or a large lab, education-plan onboarding support is available - reach out to your SimplyPrint education contact or email contact@simplyprint.io for School and Enterprise onboarding.



Updated on: 24/06/2026

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