In this guide 6 sections
Map who may approve which amount. Require a complete request at submission, route by amount and category, escalate when an approver stays silent, and log every decision with its evidence attached for later audits. Large requests still need a human. Software routes; people decide.
Map who can approve what, and at which threshold
Start with paper, not software. Write down who may approve which expense up to which limit, who adds a countersignature above it, and which categories always go to one named person. Consider a printing and packaging company where branch managers email receipt photos to head office, and approval depends on one accounts clerk remembering to open that shared inbox.
Writing it down exposes gaps. Limits set years ago may never have been revisited, and an approval path may quietly depend on one manager who spends half the month travelling between sites. Fix those before automating. An automated version of an unclear approval chain only delivers the same confusion to the wrong inbox faster, with a timestamp attached to every mistake.
Define what a request must contain before it is submitted
Incomplete requests cause the slowest approvals. The approver must chase the requester for a missing vendor quote, an expense receipt, an account code or a manager’s note explaining the exception. Define the evidence per request type.
Make the form refuse incomplete submissions. A purchase needs a quote attached, a claim needs a receipt image, and a leave or budget exception needs a reason before the submit button works. Checking completeness at submission often speeds turnaround more than the routing rules do, because it removes the back and forth that used to follow every filed request.
Configure routing, escalation and delegation
The routing rule reads the amount, department and category on each request and sends it to the approver named in your authority map. Escalation covers a silent approver. After a set wait the system sends a reminder, and after a longer wait it reroutes the request to a named backup so nothing sits untouched for a fortnight.
Delegation covers planned absences. An approver going on leave, or their manager, should be able to deputise a named colleague for set dates, logged as a deliberate setting. Never share passwords instead. A borrowed login is a security hole and leaves no record of who actually approved a purchase order on a given afternoon.
Keep an audit trail and a human check
Every decision gets logged. Record who approved, when, and exactly what they saw at that moment, including the amount, the attachments and the requester’s stated reason. That history settles later disputes about who authorised a purchase, which an email chain scattered across several inboxes and forwarded without context never can. For the largest payments, require agreement from two of three directors, a quorum the system can enforce and record, with any veto or overrule logged under the director’s name.
Keep some decisions human. A routine low-risk request can go straight to the named approver, while a large or unusual one must wait for an explicit decision, not a notification anyone can ignore. Watch for slicing, where one large purchase is split into several small ones that each fall under a limit, and flag any vendor receiving repeated orders just below it. Software moves requests, people decide.
Pilot the workflow and measure turnaround
Start with expense claims only. Record how many days approvals took before the change and after it, plus how many requests needed escalation or a delegate during the first month. A short pilot exposes a threshold set wrong or a category mapped to the wrong approver while the stakes are still small and fixes cost an afternoon.
Then add purchase requests. Once turnaround has improved and escalations are rare, extend the same routing, escalation and evidence rules to purchase requests or leave approvals, reusing the authority map you already built.
Approval routing diagram
A flowchart following one request from submission through the completeness check to the approver chosen by amount and category, then escalation after silence, ending at a logged decision. Redraw it with your own limits.
Open a blank worksheet to printQuestions owners ask
How are absent approvers handled?
Two settings cover absence. Escalation will reroute a stalled request to a backup after a defined wait, so an absentee approver never freezes the queue for the rest of the team. Delegation lets an approver hand their queue to a named colleague for known dates, with the handoff itself recorded in the audit log.
Can approvals happen on a phone?
Yes, and it helps owners who are rarely at a desk. The screen must still show the amount, the reason and the attached quote or receipt, because a bare yes or no button invites rubber stamping.
Which requests should stay manual?
Anything large, unusual or outside a category’s normal pattern, such as a first-time vendor or a repeated exception. Route those to a named person for an explicit decision.