Gate Reviews

Overview

Gate Reviews in GovDash let you and your team review opportunities in stages, giving you better insight earlier into opportunities that may not be the best fit. You can review capture questions as a team, collaborate with comments and @mentions, assign approvers in parallel or sequential order, request changes on specific questions, track every action in a fully exportable audit log, and generate review presentations. Together, these make Gate Reviews a powerful tool during each phase of an opportunity.

Accessing and Running Gate Reviews

To access Gate Reviews within an opportunity, select Gate Reviews from the left-hand navigation menu.

Starting a Gate Review

Each phase has its own gate review that you can run. Click Start Gate under the phase you want to review to set its status to In Progress. Once you have assigned your reviewers (see the next section), notifications will be sent to request approval from the currently assigned reviewers, following the parallel or sequential order you configured.

Assigning Reviewers

To run a gate review of a phase, assign reviewers from your team using the Add Reviewers button under the Reviewers section. You can assign as many reviewers as you want and change them at any point.

Configure your approval chain to either Parallel or Sequential.

• Parallel —  Reviewers can approve at the same time. Reviews do not depend on each other.

• Sequential —  Reviewers approve in order. A reviewer is blocked until the previous approves.

Assigned reviewers receive an email with a link to the opportunity’s review page, notifying them that they’ve been selected as a reviewer and to take action.

Pre-Configuring Reviewers and Approvals

As part of the Capture Plan Template feature, you can pre-assign reviewers for specific phases, pre-configure approval chain modes per phase, and configure settings for auto task creation and auto-advancing gates upon approval.

Permissions

GovDash allows you to configure roles to allow (or remove) permission to be an approver for a gate review. Please have your GovDash administrator review our support documentation on Roles & Permissions here.

Reviewing a Phase

Within a phase, the Questions subtab is organized into three sections so reviewers can focus on what matters:

• All Questions — every question for the phase.

• Unanswered — only the questions that still need answers.

• Comments — questions that have comments attached to them.

Click into any question to view its answer. You can leave comments on a question and tag (@mention) specific teammates to bring them into the conversation, then post the comment.

Reviewers can also quickly jump to a phase’s questions by selecting the icon next to the answered-questions count in the phase status box, which takes them to that phase’s questions.

Generating a Review Presentation and Reviewing Previous Reviews

Generate a review at any point to produce an overview presentation of the current phase and all previously approved phases in an easily digestible format. The presentation gives you and your team a full view of where you stand: key opportunity details, the number of capture questions answered, your team’s recorded answers (including answers to questions from previous gates), current review progress, the list of reviews, and more.

To generate a review, click the Generate Review button within the Past Reviews tab. Anyone can generate a review at any time, it is not limited to the approvers assigned to the gate review.

Generating Reviews

After each gate review is approved, a presentation is generated automatically, so you do not need to generate one manually.

You can view any generated presentation by clicking on the review title, or delete any previous review presentation by selecting the Delete option under the three-dot action menu.

Creating Tasks

Use the Tasks tab to create new tasks tied to this specific opportunity directly within the gate review. This keeps follow-up items and their owners attached to the review, where your team is already working, so nothing slips between gates.

Approving, Rejecting, and Requesting Changes

Each assigned reviewer acts on the current gate. Reviewers have three options:

• Approve — approve the current gate, optionally adding comments.

• Reject — reject the current gate, optionally adding comments.

• Request Changes — flag specific questions from the current gate and request changes on them. The review then shows that changes have been requested, so the team knows exactly what needs attention.

If a reviewer approves by accident, they can rescind their approval at any time before the phase is marked complete.

Completing a Phase

Once a phase is approved, the reviewer(s) mark the phase as complete in order to advance. Marking a phase complete automatically moves the opportunity to the next phase for the next gate and updates everything below it, the page refreshes to show the new set of capture questions for the next gate. Your previous reviews remain available at any time from the Past Gate Reviews tab.

Resetting a Review

You can reset a review to clear the current approval progress and start the review over. A flag control lets you indicate which section a question belongs to and whether it is answered or unanswered, giving your team a clean, organized starting point for the next round of review.

Audit Log

Gate Reviews include a full audit log that records every action taken during the review: who requested changes, who added or removed reviewers, who changed gates, and who approved or rejected. The audit log is fully exportable, giving you a complete, shareable record of the review process for compliance and internal tracking.