Is there a way to mark an inflight project as approved?

Hello all,

Is there a way to mark an already active project as approved? Most if not all of our projects are approved before even being added to WF, so they jump straight from Idea to Current. Where this is causing issues is with the Portfolio Optimizer. It seems like this approval button is what's holding back the score data in this section. Is there a recommended way to mark projects as approved without messing around with the project status and triggering a bunch of emails to the end users?