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Auto Approve

A parent on a 12-hour shift can't approve "Make bed" before the child wants to know whether it counted. With auto-approve, a chore that has waited for approval longer than a set number of hours approves itself at the points the child was promised, exactly as if you had tapped Approve.

Auto-approve after (hours) in Settings

New in v7.0.0

Turning It On

TaskMate panel → Settings → Auto-approve after (hours) (with the other parent approval settings)

Setting Key Default Description
Auto-approve after (hours) auto_approve_hours 0 Chores still waiting this long approve themselves. Whole hours, 1–168 (a week). 0 = off

TaskMate checks once a minute, so a completion approves itself within a minute of reaching the limit. The clock starts when the child completed the chore.

What Gets Approved

Any chore completion still waiting for approval, once it's older than the limit. It's approved exactly as a parent's tap would: the promised points are paid, and streaks, badges, challenges, quests, weekly goals and a waiting make-it-right refund all follow as normal.

Two kinds always wait for you, however long it takes:

Never auto-approved Why
Open-ended chores The child only suggested a price; a parent has to set the real one
Bounty work A bounty pays its own posted reward and has its own claim rules

Reward claims are not affected: only chore completions auto-approve.

If an approval fails for some reason (for example the chore has since been deleted), that completion is skipped and stays waiting.

Knowing It Happened

Each auto-approval:

  • marks the completion with auto_approved: true, so it can be told apart from one a parent approved
  • fires the taskmate_chore_auto_approved event, with child_id, child_name, chore_id, chore_name, points and hours (the setting at the time)
  • shows as Chore auto-approved on the child's event entity

A notification for it is easy to build from the event:

triggers:
  - trigger: event
    event_type: taskmate_chore_auto_approved
actions:
  - action: notify.mobile_app_parent_phone
    data:
      message: >-
        {{ trigger.event.data.chore_name }} for {{ trigger.event.data.child_name }}
        was approved automatically after {{ trigger.event.data.hours }} hours.

You can still undo an auto-approved chore from the activity list, as with any approval.