Finance approval workflow

Before

The services holding moved purchase requests by email. A specialist sent the letter to the unit manager, who sent it to finance, who sent it to the deputy, and if the amount was high, to the chief executive. The document sat in inboxes. Once a server request stayed with a deputy for three weeks and nobody noticed, until the supplier closed the price window. The answer was I think I sent it.

The budget lived in a separate sheet. The approver saw the number in the letter and did not know how much of the month's ceiling that unit had already used. After approval, the payment was typed again into the finance software. Entering it twice meant two places to get it wrong.

What was built

The request is filed with its attachments and its cost center, and it passes through each step's queue, not through email. Specialist, unit manager, finance, deputy, and the chief executive if it passes the ceiling. Every approval has a time and a note. If someone is on leave, the deputy sees the same queue and the work does not stay locked on a personal desk.

The unit budget sits beside the request. If it passes the ceiling, the finance step cannot let it through until the budget owner writes the exception. The payment voucher is built from the approved request, and the number is not lifted out of an email. Work that sits still for three days gets a reminder on that step.

A working day

The technology specialist files the server request with the proforma. The unit manager sees the remaining budget the same day and approves. Finance writes the check against the proforma. Because the amount passes the deputy's ceiling, the work goes to the chief executive's queue. They approve two days later, and purchasing builds the voucher from that same request.

Someone who asks the next month why this purchase happened reads the thread from the start: who sent it, who saw the budget, who wrote the exception. A request lost between inboxes became a queue where you can see where it is waiting.

The result

The server purchase did not sit in silence for three weeks. The price window was not lost to a missing email. Manual chasing dropped, because every step has an owner and a time.

The holding still has multi-step approval, and it should. The steps are not paper and memory. The payment comes from the document that was approved, not from a number someone typed again.