SOP University · Lesson 1 · Basics · 12 Sep 2026
The SOP Lifecycle: Seven Stages From Draft to Revision
Best SOP Software reviewers · From vendor pricing, help-centre and product pages · Evaluated September 2026
Plain answer
An SOP moves through seven stages: draft, review, approve, publish, train, audit and revise, and then back to review for the next version. Most SOP problems come from skipping a stage, usually review or revision, not from a badly written first draft.
The life of an SOP, and which tools document each stage
A tool is listed under a stage when its own public pages describe a feature for that stage. This shows what vendors document, not how the features perform in use. Sources are on each review.
| Stage | What happens | Tools that document it |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Draft | Capture or write the steps | |
| 2 Review | A second person checks it |
|
| 3 Approve | An owner signs off |
|
| 4 Publish | Staff can find the current version | |
| 5 Train | People read, practise, confirm |
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| 6 Audit | Prove who changed what, when |
|
| 7 Revise | Update and re-approve |
What happens at each stage?
- Draft. Someone who does the task captures or writes the steps.
- Review. A second person checks the draft against how the task is really done.
- Approve. The SOP owner signs off, and the approval is recorded.
- Publish. The approved version becomes the one staff can find, and the old version is withdrawn.
- Train. The people who follow the SOP read it, practise it and confirm they have done so.
- Audit. You can show who changed, approved and read each version, and when.
- Revise. When the task changes, or at a scheduled review, the SOP is updated and goes back to review.
Where do teams lose control?
Three stages cause most trouble. Review is skipped when the author is also the expert, so errors go straight to approval. Publish fails when old copies stay in shared drives, so people follow a version that is no longer current. Revise is forgotten when no one owns the SOP, so it drifts away from how the work is done. Giving every SOP a named owner and a review date addresses all three.
Do small teams need all seven stages?
The stages are the same; the effort is not. A five-person team can review by asking a colleague to follow the steps once, and approve by recording who agreed and when. What matters is that each stage happens and leaves a record.
What record should each stage leave?
Each stage should leave evidence that it happened. A draft leaves a version with an author. Review leaves comments or a reviewer's name. Approval leaves the approver's name, the date and the outcome. Publishing leaves an effective date and marks the previous version as superseded. Training leaves a confirmation for each person and version. Revision starts a new draft and keeps the old version. The audit stage uses all of these records. If a stage leaves no record, an auditor has no way to tell that it happened.
Where do tools fit in?
The diagram above shows which of the nine tools in our ranking document a feature for each stage on their public pages. A listing is not a score: a tool shown under Approve may offer approvals only on a higher plan. Each review gives the plan for each feature, and our version control and approvals guide compares history and approval steps plan by plan.
Key terms: Approval workflow, Owner, Periodic review, Version control