3 Tips On Making Approvals Quick And Easy

Approvals – finance requires them. Managers detest them. Approvals aren’t just a matter of compliance and controls. Many are actually critical to executing important business processes such as approving a sales discount quickly to win a customer’s business, a purchase requisition to expedite time-to-market, or even expense reports for accurate end-of-quarter reporting. A clunky approvals process that doesn’t move at the pace of the business creates real operational drag and can impact the bottom line.

But why does it have to be so hard? It doesn’t.

Here are 3 Top Tips for improving your approval processes – to make your organization more agile and your users happier, while ensuring that finance has the visibility and control needed to support the organization.

Tip #1: Simplify the Workflows

Most ERP-based approval processes are engineered with a lowest- common-denominator approach. They tend to expose all of the fields and steps that might be required for the most complex approval, even though most approvals don’t require that many steps or nearly that much information. There are easy ways to adapt approval workflows with a “minimalist” approach, displaying just the necessary information and steps, depending on the type of approval.