Ask around a company why approving an invoice takes a week and the answer will almost never be "because it is hard to judge". It will be "because it was waiting with a colleague", "because it got buried in my inbox" or "because we do not know who is supposed to approve it".
That is good news. It means the problem is not the decision but the document's route — and routes can be automated.
Measure where the waiting happens
Before building anything, get two numbers: average time from receipt to approval and where in that time the document is standing still. Usually it turns out the judgement itself takes minutes and the rest is waiting.
Without that measurement it is easy to automate a step that was never holding anyone up. We describe the same principle in the piece on choosing which processes to automate.
Limits matter more than stages
Most companies start by designing approval stages: manager, director, owner. It is more practical to start with limits.
- Up to amount X the direct manager approves, one signature.
- Above X a second stage is added.
- Above Y it goes to the board.
- Outside budget it always goes higher, regardless of amount.
Alongside limits you need category exceptions — rent or utilities are recurring costs where approving the same thing every month makes no sense. Those pass automatically if the amount matches expectation; if it does not, they stop.
When the document arrives already pre-processed — the way we describe with an AI agent in accounting — the approver does not get a PDF but a finished summary: what it is, which order it belongs to, whether it matches, and what is unusual about it.
Delegation is not a detail
This is the most common cause of a stalled flow. The approver goes on holiday, documents pile up, and nobody knows until a reminder arrives.
The flow has to know three things: who deputises for whom, from when to when, and what happens when nobody responds. That last part is escalation — a reminder after two days, hand-off to the deputy after five, a note to their manager after seven. Without it, automation becomes a quieter version of the same problem.
The audit trail has to build itself
An audit asks who approved, when, and on what basis. If the system does not record it, it gets reconstructed from emails, and that is days of work.
Every step should store who, when, which version of the document they saw and what they changed. Which version they saw is the important part: if the document was edited after approval, it has to be obvious that a different version was the one approved.
What to automate and what not to
Worth automating: routing (who it should reach), chasing, escalation, pre-filling the case and recording. Everything around the decision, in other words.
Leave the decision itself to a person — with one exception that works well in practice: recurring documents within tolerance from a verified supplier can pass without intervention, as long as it is clearly visible that they went through automatically and it can be reviewed at any time.
Mobile decides the speed
A practical note from operations: approvers are often people who do not sit at a desk. If a document can be approved from a phone in two taps, including a preview, approval time drops further than any change of rules will achieve.
Where to start
Take one cost category with high volume — office supplies or recurring services, say — and build the flow for that alone. Let it run a month, measure the same number you measured at the start, and only then add more.
If you would like to walk through your approval process with someone who has seen a few, get in touch. How we build this kind of solution is visible in our case studies, and the wider context is in the AI and automation section.