Overview
When Invite Approvals are enabled on a sign-in flow, an admin must review and approve invites before sending them to the visitor. If an ID Scan is required, but is not captured during a dashboard sign-in, the entry must be approved before the visitor is signed in and their badge is printed.
Allow admins to bypass invite and ID scan approvals determines whether admins with approval permission must complete that review step for their own invites and entries. When it's on, they skip it and the invite/entry proceeds without an explicit approval. When it's off, they have to take the extra step and approve their own invite or ID scan, the same way they would for anyone else's.
This is a global setting. It applies to all admins across all of your locations; it can't be set per location or per sign-in flow.
Default setting
Visitors Enterprise customers who have been using approvals features prior to August 2026 will have this feature On by default, resulting in automatic approvals. A global admin can turn this off at any time.
This setting is off by default, so admin-created invites are not auto-approved. You can turn it on at any time to route admin invites through the approval queue like any other invite.
Admins and employees without approval permissions are unaffected by the setting; their invites always require approval when approvals are enabled on the sign-in flow.
To enable
Navigate to Global overview > Visitors > Settings.
Here, you'll see Allow admins to bypass invite and ID scan approvals.
Toggle this either On or Off to enable or disable this functionality.
This toggle automatically saves, and your change goes into effect immediately.
Disabling this setting does not apply retroactively, and any automatically approved invites or ID-bypassed entries will remain approved.
Expected behavior
Bypass approvals turned on
An admin with the approve invites permission creates an invite, and it's approved automatically. The invitation is sent to the visitor right away, and the invite doesn't appear in the Approvals queue.
An admin with the approve ID scans permission signs a visitor in directly from the dashboard, and the ID approval step is skipped.
These automatic approvals are noted in the History log.
Bypass approvals turned off
For admin approvals, the admin has to approve their own invite when creating it. The invitation isn't sent to the visitor until they do.
For visitor types that require IDs, the admin has to manually approve the ID bypass when signing a visitor in directly from the dashboard.
With the toggle off, admins can approve their own invites and entries themselves; they don't need a second person to action them. The difference is that the approval becomes an explicit, recorded step rather than an automatic one.
This setting only affects flows where approvals are already enabled. If a sign-in flow doesn't require invite approvals, nothing changes for invites created with it.
Turning the setting off applies going forward. Invites that were already approved aren't reopened for review.
If your organization needs more granular control over who approves what — for example, routing to specific teams or applying conditional rules — see Advanced Visitor Approvals.