Individual Hour Approval Settings

As a site manager that approves many individual hour submissions for users looking to become eligible for the President's Volunteer Service Award, I would love to have individual hour submissions automatically processed as "entered" instead of "pending." That will allow me to manually move them into "pending" once I have contacted their volunteer contact person for verification and while I am still waiting on a response before I can approve or decline, especially as there are oftentimes a few site managers in the system trying to keep track of who has been contacted and who has not. I know we can change the entire Hour Approval setting so that all submissions start as "entered," but I only want to be able to do this with individual hour submissions, not all. 

My current work-around is to actually move them from "pending" to "entered" while I wait on their confirmations, so it's really just about the terminology, since I have been able to find a process that allows me to keep things more organized. However, moving from pending to entered and then to approved/declined is not the most intuitive sequence of steps, so I figured I'd suggest the larger change.