Approvals that route themselves and prove they happened.
Your delegation of authority encoded once and enforced everywhere, with delegation, escalation and an evidence trail that survives an audit.
Why approvals are a control weakness
The delegation of authority is usually a well-written document that no system enforces. Approvals happen in email, in chat, and occasionally verbally. The control exists on paper and not in the process — which is a finding waiting to happen.
- Approvals arrive by email, chat message or forwarded thread.
- When an approver is on leave, the request either stalls or gets approved by somebody without the authority.
- Value limits are policy rather than enforcement — the system will accept whatever is entered.
- Reconstructing who approved a given transaction means searching mailboxes.
What we build
One routing engine that holds your delegation of authority as configuration, applies it to every request type that needs it, and records the result as evidence rather than as correspondence.
- Your delegation of authority encoded as rules, by value, type, entity and cost centre
- Routing to the correct approver automatically, with the request context attached
- Delegation and out-of-office handling that preserves the authority limit
- Escalation when an approval ages past its service level
- Hard enforcement of limits, so an over-limit approval cannot be recorded
- An immutable trail: who, what, when, on what evidence, and what changed after
How it runs
Configuration first. The routing logic is a policy artefact, not code buried in a workflow.
- 01Encode the authority matrix
The delegation of authority becomes structured configuration that finance and internal audit can read and sign off.
- 02Connect the request types
Purchase requisitions, invoices, credit notes, contracts, leave — whichever request types are in scope trigger the same engine.
- 03Route and enforce
Each request finds its approver by rule. Limits are enforced at the point of approval rather than checked afterwards.
- 04Escalate and delegate
Ageing requests escalate on a defined clock. Absence delegates authority within limits instead of around them.
- 05Record as evidence
Every decision is written to an append-only trail with the document version that was approved.
What changes once it is running
A control that exists in the process rather than only in the policy.
Limits are enforced
An approval outside somebody’s authority is not possible, rather than detectable after the fact.
Nothing stalls on absence
Delegation is configured, so leave and travel stop being a reason work waits.
The trail reconstructs itself
Audit questions are answered from the record instead of from a mailbox search.
Approval time becomes measurable
How long approvals take, and where they queue, becomes a reported number the business can act on.
How an engagement is shaped
Short, because the hard part is agreeing the matrix rather than building the routing.
Authority workshop
One to two weeks with finance and the process owners to turn the delegation of authority into unambiguous rules — including the cases the document does not currently cover.
Build and pilot
Routing built and piloted on one request type and one entity before extending to the rest.
Extend and operate
Additional request types added against the same engine, with optional managed change as the matrix evolves.
Common questions
The things buyers ask before they commit. If yours is not here, it is a good first question for the assessment.
- Can people approve from their phone?
- Yes. Approval actions work from mobile with the request context and document attached. The evidence recorded is the same regardless of the channel used.
- Our delegation of authority changes fairly often. Is that a problem?
- No — it is the reason to hold it as configuration rather than code. Changes are made and versioned without a development cycle, and the trail records which version of the matrix applied to each historical decision.
- Can approvals happen in Teams or email rather than another portal?
- Yes, where the channel can carry the evidence requirement. We would rather meet approvers where they already work than add a system they have to remember to visit.
- What if the authority matrix has gaps?
- It usually does, and the workshop finds them. Undefined cases are the ones that currently get resolved informally, which is precisely the exposure. You decide the rule; we encode it.
Bring your delegation of authority.
We will walk it against real transactions and show you which paths the current process cannot actually enforce.