Task Approval Setup

Hello. Anyone here know how to set task approvals for a project? Basically, all tasks that are created in this project need approval. User will enter task and will set task status to 'in-progress' which will trigger approval process. At this time, it's a manual 'add approval process' each time a task is created. I would like to setup for automatic approval. I've also noticed that initiating approvals at 'new' status really doesn't work. I've tried, but once I created the task (which defaults to new) it didn't kick off the approval process. I needed to re-reselect the 'new' status. Any have the same issue? Thank you, Susan Susan Pfeil