Drawing Approval Stamps Explained: APPROVED, REVISE, REJECTED, FOR REVIEW & AS BUILT
Short answer: A drawing approval stamp is a short, standardised mark that records a reviewer's decision on a drawing or submittal — most commonly APPROVED, REVISE (revise and resubmit), REJECTED, FOR REVIEW, and AS BUILT. Each stamp is a status with consequences: it says who reviewed the drawing, what they decided, and what the recipient is now allowed to do with it. Archi Check ships these five as one-click presets so every stamped decision carries an owner, a date, and a tracked status rather than living as ink on a printout.
On a busy project, the difference between a drawing that is safe to build from and one that is not often comes down to a single word in the corner of the sheet. Approval stamps exist because that decision needs to be unambiguous, attributable, and recorded. They are not decoration — they are the formal handover of responsibility from the person who checked the drawing to the person who acts on it.
Yet the vocabulary is surprisingly inconsistent across offices and regions. "Approved as noted" in one practice means the same as "make corrections noted" in another, and a stamp that looks reassuring can carry liability the reviewer never intended. This guide sets out the five stamps that matter most, what each one actually commits you to, and how to keep the whole chain auditable.
Why drawing approval stamps exist
An approval stamp does three jobs at once. It records a decision, it attributes that decision to a named reviewer on a specific date, and it tells the recipient what they may now do. Strip away any one of those and the stamp stops being useful: a decision with no owner cannot be questioned, and an owner with no date cannot be tied to a revision.
The stakes are highest on submittals — shop drawings, product data, and samples that a contractor or fabricator produces and the design team reviews. Here the stamp is a legal interface. Stamping a shop drawing "approved" does not transfer responsibility for the contractor's means, methods, or dimensions, but a carelessly worded stamp can blur that line. This is why most review stamps include qualifying language: the reviewer is confirming general conformance with the design intent, not guaranteeing every dimension. The exact wording is a deliberate act of risk management.
The same logic applies inside the design office. When a checker marks a drawing set ready to issue, that internal approval is the record that a quality check happened, who did it, and when. If a defect surfaces later, the stamp is the first thing anyone looks for.
The five stamps that matter
Dozens of stamp variants exist, but almost all of them collapse into five decisions. These are the five Archi Check uses as presets because they cover the full lifecycle of a drawing from first review to record.
APPROVED
The drawing is accepted as submitted. Work may proceed on the basis of it. On a submittal this is the equivalent of "no exceptions taken" — the reviewer has found nothing that needs changing before the work goes ahead. APPROVED is the strongest statement a reviewer makes, so it should only be used when the drawing genuinely needs no further action. If there are comments, however minor, the honest stamp is REVISE, not APPROVED with a note hoping someone reads it.
REVISE
The drawing is not accepted as submitted; corrections are required and the drawing must come back. This is the "revise and resubmit" or "make corrections noted" decision. The crucial point is that REVISE keeps the loop open — the reviewer has not approved anything, and the recipient is expected to make the marked changes and return the drawing for another pass. Most QC failures live here: a drawing is stamped for revision, the changes are made, but no one confirms they were made correctly, and the open item quietly disappears.
REJECTED
The drawing is not acceptable and should not be resubmitted in its current form. REJECTED is stronger than REVISE: it signals that the submission is fundamentally wrong — the wrong product, a misread of the design, or a drawing that does not address the requirement — and that a fresh approach is needed rather than corrections to this one. Used sparingly, it is an important signal; overused, it becomes noise.
FOR REVIEW
The drawing is issued so that others can comment, not so that anyone can build from it. FOR REVIEW (sometimes "for information" or "for comment") sets the bar deliberately low: the issuer is sharing a current state for coordination or feedback, and the recipient must not treat it as a construction instruction. Getting this status right prevents the most dangerous mistake in document control — someone building from a drawing that was never meant to leave the review stage.
AS BUILT
The drawing records what was actually constructed, including the changes that happened on site. AS BUILT is the closing status of a drawing's life: it is no longer an instruction to build but a record of the finished work, used for handover, operation, and any future alteration. Because as-built drawings feed facilities management and later projects, an AS BUILT stamp carries its own responsibility — it asserts that the drawing reflects reality, not the original intent.
Approval stamps vs issue-status stamps
It helps to separate two families of stamp that often get muddled. A review or approval stamp records a decision about a drawing someone else produced — the submittal review case. An issue-status stamp records what a drawing is being released for. The same word can appear in both families, which is where confusion starts.
| Stamp | What it records | What the recipient may do |
|---|---|---|
| APPROVED | Reviewer accepts the drawing as submitted | Proceed with the work as drawn |
| REVISE | Corrections required; drawing must return | Make the noted changes and resubmit |
| REJECTED | Submission is fundamentally unacceptable | Start again with a new submission |
| FOR REVIEW | Issued for comment and coordination only | Comment; do not build from it |
| AS BUILT | Record of what was actually constructed | Use for handover, O&M, future works |
If your office also uses formal status codes such as those in ISO 19650, the approval stamp and the status code should agree — a sheet marked "for construction" should not also carry a FOR REVIEW stamp. For how the coded system maps onto these plain-language stamps, see ISO 19650 status codes explained.
"Approved as noted" and the wording that carries risk
The most contested stamp is the middle ground between APPROVED and REVISE: "approved as noted," "make corrections noted," or "no exceptions taken except as noted." It means the drawing is accepted provided the marked corrections are made, without requiring another formal resubmission. It is efficient, because it avoids a full round trip for minor comments — but it is also where disputes start.
The risk is twofold. First, "approved" is doing a lot of work in that phrase; if the noted corrections are substantive, the recipient may proceed believing they have a clean approval. Second, because no resubmission is required, there is often no record that the noted corrections were actually made. The drawing was approved-as-noted, the contractor built it, and whether the notes were honoured is anyone's guess. If your process uses this stamp, the discipline that makes it safe is verification: someone has to confirm the noted corrections appeared in the work, and that confirmation has to be recorded.
How approval stamps fit a QC workflow
A stamp is a decision, and a decision is only as good as the follow-through. The reason approval stamps fail is rarely that the reviewer made the wrong call — it is that the call was made on paper, the drawing moved on, and nobody tracked whether the required action happened. A REVISE stamp with no closure is indistinguishable from no review at all.
This is the gap a real quality-control loop closes. Instead of a stamp being a static mark, each decision becomes a tracked item with an owner and a status: raised, assigned, corrected, verified, closed. The reviewer stamps REVISE and the comment is assigned to whoever owns the fix; when the fix is made, someone other than the author verifies it; only then does the item close, with a record of what changed. The stamp starts the loop instead of ending it.
Where Archi Check fits
Archi Check is purpose-built QC software for architectural drawing sets, and the five stamps in this guide are built in as one-click presets — APPROVED, REVISE, REJECTED, FOR REVIEW, and AS BUILT. The point is not the stamp graphic; it is what happens after you place it. Every stamp in Archi Check is a tracked comment: it carries the reviewer's name, the date, the sheet and revision it was placed on, and a status that moves through Check → Correct → Verify → Close.
That turns the wording-and-risk problem into a workflow problem with an answer. A REVISE stamp cannot quietly disappear, because it stays open until someone verifies the correction and closes it. An "approved as noted" decision is auditable, because the noted corrections are tracked items, not marginalia. And because Archi Check keeps your QC data in your own project folders rather than a vendor cloud, the audit trail belongs to you. You place stamps the way you always have, using the two-screen workflow to mark up the full-size drawing while the register tracks every decision beside it. Archi Check runs on Windows today, with macOS coming soon, and there is a 14-day free trial.
FAQ
What do drawing approval stamps mean?
A drawing approval stamp records a reviewer's decision on a drawing and tells the recipient what they may do next. The common decisions are APPROVED (accepted as submitted, proceed), REVISE (corrections required, resubmit), REJECTED (fundamentally unacceptable, start again), FOR REVIEW (issued for comment only, do not build), and AS BUILT (a record of what was actually constructed).
What is the difference between "approved as noted" and "revise and resubmit"?
"Approved as noted" accepts the drawing provided the marked corrections are made, without requiring a formal resubmission. "Revise and resubmit" does not accept the drawing at all — the corrections must be made and the drawing returned for another review. The first keeps the work moving but relies on someone verifying the noted corrections; the second keeps the review loop formally open.
Does stamping a shop drawing "approved" transfer responsibility?
No. Approving a shop drawing generally confirms conformance with the design intent; it does not relieve the contractor of responsibility for dimensions, quantities, fabrication, or means and methods. That is why most review stamps include qualifying language. The wording of the stamp is a deliberate part of managing that boundary.
When should a drawing be stamped FOR REVIEW instead of APPROVED?
Use FOR REVIEW when a drawing is being shared for comment or coordination and is not yet a construction instruction. It sets the bar deliberately low and prevents the dangerous mistake of someone building from a drawing that was only meant to be reviewed. APPROVED should be reserved for drawings that genuinely need no further action.
What does an AS BUILT stamp commit you to?
An AS BUILT stamp asserts that the drawing records what was actually constructed, including site changes, rather than the original design intent. Because as-built drawings feed handover, operation, and future projects, the stamp carries a responsibility to reflect reality accurately, and the underlying redlines should be captured and verified before the record set is closed.
Make every stamp a tracked decision
Approval stamps only protect a project if the decision behind each one is recorded and followed through. If your stamps still live as ink on a printout, see how Archi Check turns them into a tracked QC workflow with a complete audit trail: Try Archi Check free for 14 days.
Related guides
Keep building out your drawing QC process with Archi Check and these related guides:
- How to redline a drawing the right way
- Drawing markup symbols explained
- As-built vs record vs red-line drawings
- ISO 19650 status codes explained
Archi Check is an independent product by Archi for architectural drawing QA/QC. Product names and trademarks referenced belong to their respective owners and are used for identification only.
