Decision cards: the Approve / Edit first / Chat about it buttons, why the text ends in "...", and "just so you know" notices that need no approval

You open the Board and a card is sitting there under a red Needs you banner, asking you to approve something that was never yours to approve. The performer who reported this said it plainly: This isn't even a task that needs anything from me, and it's making it seem like some action from me is required. This should just be a notification that I can dismiss. Two more complaints usually arrive in the same breath: Booked Solid OS is still cutting off certain messages, in tasks for example, where the message is cut off and the text ends in ... with half the card still empty. And sometimes it's not as simple as just 'approve' or 'edit first', so it would be nice to have a button that says 'chat about it'. All three are answered below. Two of them were real bugs, and both are fixed.

Two kinds of card live on the same Board

Open Activity (the button next to the Chat | Power view switch) and pick the Board tab. The Board is one live surface: running and queued jobs, plus everything Otto has parked for you sitting at the top so it cannot get buried under work in progress.

What sits at the top comes in two shapes, and telling them apart is the whole answer to why is it asking me to approve something that doesn't need approving:

• A real decision. Red Needs you eyebrow across the top of the card. Otto has reached something he will not do without you, such as sending a quote, committing to a fee, or locking a date, and nothing goes out until you answer. It carries Approve, Edit first, Chat about it, Not now, Never (make it a rule), and a small x in the corner.
• A heads-up notice. Calm grey eyebrow reading Just so you know. One button: Got it. There is no Approve and no Edit first on it, because there was never anything to approve.

There is a third, rarer shape worth recognizing: a hand-off. It needs you, but it needs something only you can do on another screen, such as switching on a connection. Approve would be a lie there, because Otto cannot do it for you, so the card drops Approve and offers the door instead: Open Connections (or Settings, Leads, Calendar, Plays, Inbox, Tasks, Today, whichever screen it points at) alongside Not now.

You do not have to keep the app in view. The moment a new item is parked, your computer shows an OS notification that reads "A decision needs you". Real decisions also appear in the Needs your decision lists on the Today and Tasks tabs, which link back here.

Reading a decision card

Each decision card lays out the essentials in plain meta rows:

• To: who this is going to
• Fee: the money involved
• Date: the date in play

When the decision is about a specific draft, the card also carries a Read the full message button that opens the exact text Otto wants to send, so "what am I approving?" is one click away rather than a guess from a one-line summary.

Occasionally Otto has something for you that does not fit the card format. In that case you get a "Something needs your eyes" card written in prose instead: read it and answer through the chat bar. That one is still a real decision, not a heads-up.

The buttons on a real decision

1. Approve: green-lights it as is. Your verdict routes straight back into the run and Otto continues from there.
2. Edit first: opens a What should change? box. You can type anything back to Otto in plain words, not only an edit, for example "hold this and ask me again after I check my calendar". Press Send change and he reworks it with your note. The limit to know about: this is one message, and sending it releases the decision. It is not a conversation.
3. Chat about it: decides nothing. It drops an opener into the chat box beside the Board and leaves the decision parked exactly where it was. Nothing is auto-sent, and no verdict goes to the engine.
4. Not now: puts the decision on hold. It stays parked so you can come back to it later.
5. Never (make it a rule): kills this one now and writes the ban up as a standing house rule for you to approve, so you are not asked the same thing again next week.
6. The x in the corner: clears it off the Board for good. This is not a soft hide. It rewrites the underlying queue file, so the item is gone.

When Edit first is the wrong button

This is the request that produced the Chat about it button, and it is worth being blunt about the difference, because reaching for Edit first to think out loud is the common wrong turn. Edit first gives you one shot of free text and then releases the decision back into the run. If what you actually wanted was to ask Otto what he was thinking, push back once, change your mind, and only then decide, that one message is gone before the conversation starts.

Chat about it was built for exactly that. It routes no verdict, so the decision stays parked and stays approvable. Go back and forth as long as you like, then return to the card and press Approve, Edit first, or the x when you have made up your mind. It was released to customers on 18 July 2026, so if your card shows only Approve and Edit, update the app.

"Just so you know": the card with nothing for me to decide

A pure heads-up now renders as its own card type. Grey eyebrow reading Just so you know, one button reading Got it. Pressing Got it clears the card off the Board and sends no verdict to the engine at all: nothing runs, nothing is approved, nothing is rejected, no work resumes. It is purely an acknowledgement, which is the FYI behavior you were asking for, just a notification you can dismiss and move on from.

A heads-up also stays out of your way everywhere else, and each of these is worth stating on its own because customers meet them one at a time and each one alone reads like a bug:

• It is never chosen as The single best next move on the Today tab, and it is not counted in the Need you tile or the Needs your decision list there.
• It is not placed in the Needs your decision column on the Tasks tab.
• The Booth does not push it to your phone or to Telegram, so nothing arrives as "Otto needs your call" with Approve and Reject buttons over something that was only a heads up. Booth cards are for real decisions.
• Your house rules are not evaluated against it, so an unrelated rule such as a floor rate or a never-contact entry can no longer paint a red blocked banner across a card that was only ever an FYI.

The rule behind all four: if nothing is waiting on your answer, it does not get to interrupt you.

If an FYI is still showing you Approve and Edit first

Then you are on a build from before 18 July 2026, which is when this shipped. Two steps:

1. Clear the card off the Board with Not now or the small x in its top corner. Do not use Approve to make it go away. Almost everyone tries that first because it is the biggest button, and it is the wrong one: Approve pushes a verdict into a live run.
2. Update the app. Click the update badge in the top bar, then Restart & install. Full walkthrough: How updates work: the update badge and Restart & install.

Why a heads-up can still arrive as a decision

Even on the current version you may see something you would have called an FYI arrive wearing the red Needs you banner. That is deliberate, and knowing why saves you a second ticket.

The classification fails closed. An item is only demoted to a heads-up when it carries an explicit notice flag inside a real parked-decision block. A missing flag, an absent block, a flag set to false, or wording that drifted while it was being written all leave the item as a decision. Treating a real decision as an FYI is strictly worse than the reverse: over-asking wastes a moment of your time, while silently acting on your behalf cannot be undone by reading. So the app errs toward asking you.

The error worth reporting is the other direction. If something marked Just so you know should have been your call, send it in. That is the one we want to catch.

When Approve is grayed out

Booked Solid enforces your house rules at the Approve button itself. If a parked send breaks one of them, such as a fee below your floor rate or a recipient on your never-contact list, the Approve button is disabled and the card shows the reason in plain language. You can still use Edit first (for example, to raise the fee) or dismiss it, but you cannot approve something that violates your own standing rules.

Your floor rate and never-contact list live in Settings > General, so that is where to adjust a rule that is blocking something on purpose.

House rules are only checked on real decisions. A heads-up declares no action, so nothing is judged against it and its Got it button is never disabled.

Why a card's text ends in "..."

On builds before version 1.7.10, the summary on a parked-decision card was capped at 140 characters and clipped with an ellipsis, in the app and on mobile, even when there was plenty of room left on screen. A perfectly normal one-line summary lost its tail. The reported example was cut at "Leave..." when the full line read "Leave it as-is, or add an approval gate before it fires?". That was a confirmed bug. It was not anything you did, and not a sign that Otto only wrote half a thought.

It was fixed in version 1.7.10, released to customers on 18 July 2026. The display ceilings now are 400 characters for the summary and 200 characters for the "your move" line, both raised from 140, and the cards wrap freely, so a normal summary shows in full. The card headline is still held to 90 characters by design, so a very long headline can still end in an ellipsis while the full summary reads underneath it. Where a card cites a real draft, Read the full message always shows you the untrimmed text.

One deliberate exception: the Telegram Booth card on your phone keeps its own tighter limit of 160 characters, because a chat bubble is not a card. So the same decision can read shorter on your phone than in the app. That shortness is the cap plus the privacy scrubbing, which strips client emails, phone numbers and ids before the message rides to Telegram. The full context is waiting in the app. See Booth troubleshooting: approvals that ask for the desktop, and other quirks.

What you have to do about any of this: nothing but update. The app updates itself, or you can reinstall from booked.kivimedia.co/download.

Job cards on the same Board

Alongside decision and heads-up cards you will see job cards for running and queued work:

• Click a job card to steer it in chat. If the job is running right now, clicking jumps you to the Live view so you can watch it act by act.
• Each job card has its own x to clear it from the Board.

Approving from your phone

On the Otto tier you can set up the Booth in Settings > General so parked decisions also arrive on your phone as Telegram cards with Approve and Reject buttons. A tap on your phone applies the verdict through the exact same path as the in-app buttons. Heads-up notices are not sent there, so the Booth only ever buzzes you about something that is genuinely yours to answer.

If your cards still do not look like this

Check your version first: everything above (the Chat about it button, the Just so you know card, the raised text limits) landed on 18 July 2026, and an app that has not restarted in a while is still running the old build. If you are up to date and a card is still asking you to approve something with nothing for you to decide, submit a ticket from this help center with the card's headline and we will look at how that item was classified.

Still stuck? Submit a ticket from this help center and we'll take it from there.