How to replace manual approvals without disrupting your business.

Most organizations don't decide to digitalize approvals overnight. It usually starts with a specific frustration — a request that sat in someone's inbox for two weeks, or a decision nobody can trace back to who actually made it. The good news is that replacing manual approvals doesn't require reinventing how your organization works. It requires making the rules that already exist explicit.

Start with the rules that already exist

Before designing anything new, write down how approvals actually work today — not how the policy document says they should work. In most companies, those two things have quietly drifted apart.

• Who is authorized to approve what amount or type of request
• What happens when the usual approver is unavailable
• What counts as an exception, and who can grant one
• How long an approval should reasonably take at each step

Map the current process before changing it

Move the rules into a structured workflow

Once the rules are explicit, they can be encoded as routing logic: who a request goes to first, what conditions change the path, and what happens if nobody responds in time.

What changes for the people involved

For requesters, the biggest change is visibility — knowing where a request stands without asking. For approvers, it's less follow-up and clearer context at the point of decision. For management, it's a record of what actually happened, not a reconstruction after the fact.