eProcureAI / Platform / Speed up approvals
Use caseThey stall because a request arrives incomplete, lands with the wrong person, or sits unnoticed in an inbox. All three are fixable without touching a single one of your controls.
Nothing gets loosened. The thresholds you have today are the thresholds you keep.
Ask why approvals take a week and you will hear that people are busy. Watch what actually happens and the picture is different.
A request arrives without the quote attached, so it goes back. It reaches a manager who is not the right approver for that amount, so it moves again. It lands in an inbox on a Thursday afternoon and nobody looks until Monday. The approver themselves spends four minutes on it, once they finally see it.
So the fix is not pressure on approvers. It is making sure the request is complete when it arrives, that it goes to the right person immediately, and that it does not sit silently when somebody is on leave.
This matters more than the speed. Nothing here involves raising a threshold or removing a step. The same amounts trigger the same approvers. What changes is that the routing happens instantly, the budget is checked before anybody is asked to look, and the chasing is done by the system rather than by a person keeping a list.
Teams that try to fix approval delay by loosening controls end up with a faster process and worse spend. Fixing the mechanics gets the speed without that trade.
A missing quote or budget code sends it back, and the round trip costs days. Guided forms make the required fields conditional on what is being bought, so incomplete requests cannot be submitted.
Manual routing means somebody guesses. Rules read the department and the amount and build the chain before anyone is notified.
An email in a busy inbox is not a queue. Ageing requests get reminders on your schedule and escalate if they stay quiet.
Work stops for a fortnight because one person is on leave. Delegation is scoped and time boxed, with both names kept on the record.
The single biggest cause of delay disappears before an approver is involved, because the form will not let somebody submit without what the approver needs.
Department and amount decide the chain, and the budget check runs before anyone is asked. The approver opens something that has already been through three checks.
Reminders and escalation happen on your schedule, and delegation covers absence. The system keeps the list so nobody else has to.
Yours will differ in the numbers rather than the structure. Most teams have a working set inside an afternoon.
| Rule | Applies to | Range | Approvers | Logic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Everyday catalog spend | All departments | Under your threshold | Nobody | Straight through |
| Standard purchase | All departments | Above that threshold | Department manager | Single approver |
| Department specific | IT and Engineering | A defined band | Manager, then Finance | Sequential |
| Large commitment | All departments | Above the upper band | Manager, Finance, function head | Sequential |
| New supplier | All departments | Any amount | Procurement and Finance | Parallel |
Rules are checked against each other when saved, so two rules covering the same department and amount cannot both fire.
A scoped delegate picks it up with an end date, and both names stay on the record so nothing looks like it was signed by somebody on a beach.
Reminders go out on your schedule and escalate if ignored. No human keeps a chase list.
It routes as an exception with the shortfall shown rather than being refused, because a refusal usually just moves the purchase somewhere invisible.
If the new figure crosses into a different rule it routes again from that point. Approvals for a smaller number are not reused.
A shorter chain rather than no chain. Fewer approvers, same evidence, so speed does not cost the record.
They can question it on the request rather than by email, so the exchange stays attached to the thing being discussed.
Speed comes from removing the waiting, not from removing the checking.
Fill in a form, or read one screen and decide. Nobody needs to know the approval matrix.
Everything between somebody pressing submit and somebody else being asked to decide.
We will build your real rules on screen and put a live request through them so you can see where it lands.
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