Your accountant can prepare a GST return and send it to you for approval. You review the figures, approve, and only then does it go anywhere. It replaces the arrangement where either you did the whole return yourself or your accountant filed it in your name with nothing written down.
Who can approve
You can, because you own the workspace. You can also make a team member an approver.
An accountant cannot approve. That is deliberate and not a setting: an accountant you invite has read-only access to your books by design, and preparing a return does not change that. Nobody can approve their own work either — not your accountant, not a team member, not you if you prepared it.
What you see before approving
The return, the period, who prepared it, and the tax payable. The figure is shown plainly and never blocks the approval — a large return is exactly the one you most need to be able to sign off.
If the return changes after you approve it
The approval stops counting and it comes back to you. Finocket keeps a fingerprint of the exact figures you approved, so if anything is edited afterwards, what you agreed to no longer matches what would be filed. You are asked again rather than told later.
This is the part worth knowing: what you approved is what gets filed, and nothing else can be.
How you find out
The request appears in the bell at the top of the screen and is emailed to you. Both your name and your accountant’s are kept with the record, so months later it is still clear who prepared a return and who approved it.
Nothing is filed automatically
Approving is not filing. It marks the return as agreed and ready. Sending it to the GST portal remains a separate, deliberate step.