Case studies / Finance
Case studyA payment approvals workflow for a finance team
A finance team approving hundreds of payments a month by email moved to a workflow with clear limits and a full audit trail, making approvals faster and audits easier.
Overview
The shared finance function of a privately owned hospitality and leisure group in Northern Europe, running hotels, restaurants and venues as separate companies with central accounts payable and treasury.
Scale. About 900 payment approvals every month across supplier invoices, one-off payments, refunds and intercompany transfers, approved by managers across seven companies.
The challenge
When the external auditors asked to see who had approved a sample of payments, the finance team spent the best part of a week searching inboxes. For some payments the approval was a forwarded email with a one-word reply. For a few, it could not be found at all.
Payments were approved by email. Accounts payable sent invoices and payment requests to managers, who replied when they saw them. Reminders went back and forth, and payment runs were held up while the team waited for the last few approvals.
Approval limits existed on paper but were not applied consistently. Managers were unsure whether they could approve a given amount, so many requests were escalated to directors just in case, and directors became a bottleneck.
There was no single view of what was waiting for approval. The accounts payable team tracked outstanding requests in a spreadsheet and chased each manager individually, and treasury could not be sure which payments would be ready for the next run.
Holidays caused problems. When an approver was away, requests sat in their inbox until someone noticed, and informal delegation was rarely recorded.
The group was growing through acquisition, and each new company brought its own approval habits, which made the email approach harder to control every year.
The solution
Payment requests are created from invoices and payment proposals in the ERP and enter the workflow automatically, with the supporting documents attached from the document store.
The workflow engine applies the agreed approval limits. Each request goes to the approver whose limit covers it, and larger payments route through a second approver where the matrix requires it. Requests within a manager's limit no longer go to directors.
Approvers receive a notification by email with a link to a simple approval screen, where they see the invoice, the supplier, the amount and the history. They can approve, reject or query with a comment, from a desktop or a phone.
Sign-in uses the group's identity service, so every approval is linked to a named person, and access is removed automatically when someone leaves. Approvers can delegate to a colleague for a period, and the delegation is recorded.
Every step is captured in an audit trail: who requested, who approved, when, under which limit and with which documents. Approved payments are released to the banks through the existing payment files.
Reports show requests waiting by approver and age, approval times by company and payments approved under delegation, so the accounts payable team can see where to follow up without chasing everyone.
The engagement
- Four months
- Four specialists
- Review of approval practice and limits, design and build of an approvals workflow with limits, delegation, notifications, audit trail and reporting, integration with the ERP, email, identity service, banks and document store, a pilot with one company and group rollout.
Integrations
- ERP
- Identity service
- Banks
- Document store
How we delivered it
- 01
Review approval practice
Three weeks
We reviewed how approvals actually worked across the companies and agreed a clear approval matrix with the finance director: limits by role, company, payment type and amount, with rules for delegation.
- 02
Build the workflow
Seven weeks
We built the workflow engine, approval screens, notifications, audit trail and reporting, and connected the ERP, identity service, banks and document store.
- 03
Pilot with one company
Three weeks
One company ran all its payment approvals through the workflow. We tuned the limits, notification timing and screens based on approvers' feedback.
- 04
Roll out across the group
Four weeks
The remaining companies joined in two waves, with short training for approvers and a guide to the new limits.
Results
- Faster approvals and on-time payment runs
- Complete approval records for every payment
- Audit evidence produced as a report
- Most escalations removed by clear limits
Approvals are faster. Requests go straight to the right person, reminders are automatic and payment runs are no longer held up waiting for the last few replies.
Records are complete. Every payment has a clear approval trail linked to a named approver, the applicable limit and the supporting documents.
Audit has become easier. Auditors now receive approval evidence as a report, and the week of inbox searching has disappeared. Internal reviews of segregation of duties take hours rather than days.
Clear limits removed most escalations. Managers know what they can approve, so directors see only the payments that genuinely need them, and their approval queues have shrunk.
New companies joining the group are added by extending the approval matrix, and they adopt the same workflow from their first payment run.
Once everyone could see their limit, the requests stopped landing on my desk just in case.
What made the difference
Clear limits removed most escalations.
