How to Use Approval Routing in Your Organization

What is Approval Routing?

Approval routing is a way to ensure that the appropriate resources review critical information like documents, forms, files, and requests and that all company business rules, standards, and regulations are met. Should there be a question of why a choice was made, who authorized it, and whether it complied with the company’s internal policies, approval routing provides a clear, concise audit map of what happened.

How is Approval Routing Used?

Once information is submitted manually through a form or automatically through an integration, routing rules dictate the path the information will travel. Dynamic approval routing allows information to travel different paths depending on input received. For instance, if a request is rejected, it will follow a rejection or “return for more information” path as dictated by the approval process.

In most cases, an employee submits the original request to their supervisor, another final approver, or a series of approvers. For instance, they might submit purchase orders that need to be reviewed and approved by a gauntlet of approvers from their supervisor to the CFO. Approval routing ensures that all critical decisions are made and tracked.

Approval routing can be helpful regardless of company size, industry, department, and location. If there are complex projects to review or critical hiring decisions, the approval chain should ideally wind its way through multiple departments and staff members. It’s hard to know who agreed to what and when without tracking. It also leads to errors, slow turnaround times, and wasted resources.

What Are the Benefits of Approval Routing?

Route approvals help people track how money is being spent, which can reduce waste or unauthorized charges. The clear audit trail informs decision-makers how their departments are spending finite budgets. With more oversight, people can see how to comply with the company’s larger strategies more clearly.

What Are Some Examples?

Approval routing platforms are typically departmentally-agnostic. That is to say, they are designed to be flexible for any situation. While some systems may lead toward finance, IT, HR, customer service, etc., these systems can be configured for any routing scenario.

Some examples of approval processes our customers automate:

• New Product Requests

• Document Approvals

• Contract Review Approvals

• Capital Expense Approvals

• Leave of Absence Approvals

• IT Project Requests

• Pricing Discount Requests

• New Hire Requests

• Logo and Branding Approvals

How Nutrient Workflow Can Help with Route Approvals

Nutrient Workflow helps businesses automate processes for efficiency, better service, and stricter compliance. Our dynamic forms and integrations can be tailored to capture any information and our process builder can be used to determine routing paths, assign tasks, deliver notifications, and much more.

It can be time-consuming and confusing to get people involved in too many decisions, enough so businesses streamline their decisions to avoid snags along the way. However, with tools from Nutrient Workflow, decision-makers can track requests and expenses as they come in and as a whole. This can help them identify more significant trends in the approval routing system, leading to even more efficient spending.

FAQs

Can I designate the order of approval steps?

Yes. With Nutrient Workflow, you can ensure that certain people will not review the request until it’s been approved by people further down the chain. To save time, you can set up standard templates (e.g., travel expenses, etc.) that can be used repeatedly.

Can decision-makers add input during the approval routing process?

Yes. Approval tasks can include comments or even additional forms that approvers complete. In addition, the options given to the approver are completely customizable. For instance, Approve, Reject, Send Back for More, Escalate, Re-Route, and Re-Assign can be used. Or administrators can create their own, with the appropriate routing.

How can I best implement route approvals in my organization?

The first step is to map out your approval processes. We have a variety of tools that can help you with this step. Just visit our Resources area and Blog. Next, you must select an approval automation platform to implement your approval process. We can help there as well.

Interested in Automating Your Approval Routing?

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