Guide
Any control slower than its workaround produces the workaround.
Approval design is usually treated as a policy exercise. It is mostly a latency problem: the rule that takes three days to clear is the rule people learn to avoid.
Design guide
What an approval workflow is actually for.
Approval has three jobs: making sure the spend is wanted, making sure it is affordable, and leaving evidence that both were checked. Everything else in an approval design is machinery in service of those three.
Workflows fail when the machinery outgrows the purpose — when a €40 order carries the same ceremony as a €40,000 one, or when the approver has no basis on which to decide because the request is a line of free text.
02Design
Five decisions that decide whether the workflow is followed.
An approval workflow is a series of design choices, and each one has a specific failure attached to it. Reading them in order is the fastest way to audit your own.
- 01◇ DecisionThe rule
Decide what needs approving at all
Not every purchase deserves a signature; a threshold that is too low is a threshold nobody respects.
The decision to make
Set the level where the control is worth the delay it creates.
The failure it prevents
A queue of trivial approvals that trains approvers to click without reading.
- 02◇ DecisionThe rule
Decide who sees it, deterministically
Amount, category, site and budget owner should produce exactly one path.
The decision to make
Rules written so the same request always routes the same way.
The failure it prevents
Requests routed by whoever was asked, which cannot be audited afterwards.
↳ No rule matches · Requester side
It falls to a named default
Never to nobody. A workflow with a hole in it is routed around within a week of being noticed.
- 03Approver side
Decide what the approver sees
Lines, supplier, contracted price and the reason — enough to make a real decision.
The decision to make
Give context in the request, not in a follow-up conversation.
The failure it prevents
Approval that is only a signature, because there was nothing to judge.
- 04◇ DecisionThe rule
Decide what happens when nobody acts
Reminders, delegation and escalation are part of the design, not an afterthought.
The decision to make
A path for absence, holidays and departures, defined in advance.
The failure it prevents
The workaround: someone orders directly because approval never came back.
↳ Nobody acts · Approver side
Decided when the rule is written
Escalation or automatic approval — chosen in advance, not improvised while a requisition sits still.
- 05The rule
Decide what is kept
Who decided, when, on what basis, against which price — captured as it happens.
The decision to make
Recording as a by-product of the process rather than a separate task.
The failure it prevents
An audit answered from a mailbox, six months after the decision.
03Design
Five rules for an approval process people do not route around.
- 01
Match thresholds to real delegation
Approval limits should mirror the actual delegation of authority, including differences by site and category. A rule nobody recognises is a rule nobody defends.
- 02
Make the request decidable
An approver needs structured lines — reference, quantity, contracted price, cost centre — not a description. Most approval delay is really information delay.
- 03
Combine conditions rather than stacking levels
Amount and category and site, evaluated together, produce fewer hops than a chain of single-condition levels.
- 04
Design for absence
Delegation and escalation are not edge cases. A process that stalls during holidays trains people to bypass it permanently.
- 05
Record the decision, not just the outcome
Who approved, when, and against which rule — captured at the time, so the decision can be reconstructed rather than inferred.
04In practice
From a catalog cart to a purchase order.
Because the requisition is built from a catalog cart, the approver sees exactly what the buyer selected, at contracted prices, against a cost centre and a site.
- Requisitions
- REQ-2026-04188
Q2 maintenance consumables
- Requester
- C. Moreau
- Delivery site
- Lyon — Site 03
- Cost centre
- CC-4402
- Budget line
- MRO / 2026-Q2
| Lines | Supplier | Qty | € |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nitrile glove, powder-free, L | Nordwerk Industrie | 40 | 736,00 |
| Industrial degreaser 5 L | Ferralux SAS | 12 | 1 428,00 |
| Safety goggles, anti-fog | Meridian Tools | 25 | 612,50 |
| Absorbent pads, 40×50 | Nordwerk Industrie | 18 | 3 006,00 |
| Total excl. tax | 5 782,50 | ||
Approval
Rule: > €5,000 requires site manager + procurement
M. Lefèvre
Site manager
14 Apr, 09:12
A. Brandt
Procurement
Pending
ERP
Purchase order
Automatic
On approval, one purchase order per supplier is sent to your ERP.
- 01
Requisitions carry structure
Lines, delivery site, cost centre and budget line are present from the moment the request is raised.
- 02
Rules combine conditions
Amount, category, cost centre, site and supplier can be evaluated together rather than chained.
- 03
Multi-site in one requisition
A single request can serve several delivery sites without manual splitting.
- 04
Tracking replaces chasing
The requester sees order status, so the follow-up email stops being the tracking mechanism.
Approval workflow questions.
- How many approval levels should there be?
- Fewer than most designs start with. Each level adds latency, and latency is what drives people around the process. Combining conditions in one rule usually beats adding another level.
- Should low-value purchases be approved at all?
- Often the answer is that they should be controlled rather than approved — through a contracted assortment and a spend limit — so approval attention goes where it changes the outcome.
- Do we need this if our ERP already has approvals?
- If your ERP covers the spend that matters, no. Kelqio Approve exists for the spend categories that never reached the main system, and it is an optional module.
Next step
Bring your supplier list. We’ll show you the flow.
A working session with our team, using your systems and your supplier mix — not a generic slide deck.
- 01
Where your suppliers sit today: connected, semi-connected, or not at all
- 02
How each channel would route through Kelqio into your ERP and procurement platform
- 03
What connecting the next twenty suppliers would actually involve
Enterprise integration product. No credit card, no self-serve trial — a conversation with someone who knows procurement systems.