The short version: a rejected document is finished as far as the review process is concerned. Nobody — not the approver who rejected it, not another approver — can review it again. There are exactly two ways forward: upload a new version, or have a project Admin force-approve it. Everything else you might try will leave it exactly where it is.
What a rejection actually does
| 1 | An approver on the document's current step chooses Request changes and writes a reason. |
| 2 | The document's approval status becomes Rejected, and it stops moving through the remaining steps entirely — no matter how many were left. |
| 3 | The review actions disappear from the document for everyone. Any further attempt to review it is refused with “this attachment is no longer in review”. |
| 4 | The person who uploaded it is emailed with the reason. |
Things that do not un-reject a document: renaming it; editing its details or tags; the approver changing their mind and trying to approve it; another approver on the same step approving it; moving the condition's Status back to In Progress; changing the approval process. The rejection is attached to that version of that file, and only new content or Admin authority clears it.
The two ways forward
Fix whatever was wrong and upload the corrected file as a new version of the same document — not as a separate new document. Use the document's own upload action rather than the general upload button, so the history stays in one place.
The moment the new version lands, the approval process restarts cleanly: the earlier reviews are archived, the document goes back to step one, and the first step's approvers are notified that there is something new to look at. The rejection stays visible in the history — you can see what was wrong and that it was addressed — but it no longer blocks anything.
A project Admin can open the document and choose Force approve…. This bypasses every remaining step and marks the document approved, including one that has already been rejected. Nothing about the earlier reviews is altered or hidden — the rejection stays on the record, with the force-approval recorded alongside it as a separate, differently-worded event.
Use it when the rejection itself was the mistake — wrong document opened, reviewer misread the scope, a condition that turned out not to apply. Don't use it to skip a genuine problem: the audit trail makes it clear what happened, which is the point.
“But the only problem was the file name”
This is the single most common frustration, and it deserves a straight answer: renaming will not clear the rejection. DocuBuild does let you rename a document, and the new name applies everywhere immediately — but the approval process tracks the file's content, not its label, so a renamed document keeps the rejection it already had.
You have the same two options as anyone else. In practice, re-uploading the same file under the right name as a new version is quick and leaves the cleanest record. If re-uploading is impractical — a very large model, or a file the subcontractor would have to send again — ask an Admin to force-approve it instead, and note the reason in a comment.
Stopping it happening so often
- Give the reason properly. The rejection note is what the uploader receives by email, and it is usually the only thing they act on. “Wrong revision — needs the as-built, not the shop drawing” saves a round trip that “incorrect” does not.
- Check the step order. If documents are routinely rejected at the last step for something the first reviewer should have caught, the process is in the wrong order rather than the documents being bad.
- Watch for whole batches being rejected together. That usually means the wrong requirement was assigned, not that ten subcontractors each made a mistake.
Rejection doesn't hide the condition's progress. A condition with a rejected document still reads Submitted on the Documentation axis, because evidence did arrive — see Outstanding, Overdue, Submitted. What the rejection changes is the approval pill, which is the column that actually tracks sign-off.