By recognizing that it is possible for an intermediate "save" operation to not be final. In the U.S. Navy we had the "chop chain" concept. The etymology of the terms is worth a separate bit of research, but basically we pushed a record along by having a list of people who had to approve it. For us, engineering approvals included the original implementer, that person's boss, then the security administrator, and finally the government manager. We recognized that leaving the form open on a single computer was a road leading to corruption if the network hiccuped. So what we did is to have a status that said "Record awaiting approval" that was valid regardless of how many had approved it as long as it was waiting for one more approval. If we needed five signatures ("chops", Navy slang for signatures), having none to four signatures merely put the record in limbo waiting for the last chop.
When a record is awaiting its last chop, queries can detect it by finding records with nulls or empty strings in the fields associated with approvals. Note also that this would be a valid case for having a "child" table listing the chops by each authority so that if you needed three chops for some things, four for others, five for the nasty stuff... no problem because what you can do is automatically append the right number of records showing the people who SHOULD enter their chop and having a second column recording that they HAD entered their chop. That way, you can select for records to YOUR attention.
So... you save the record but recognize that the process isn't over. Then you don't worry about that auto save process.
