• When a purchase order or invoice is stuck waiting for approval, how does the requester find out its status -- and how does the approver's manager know that approvals are stalling?

  • When your auditors ask for a record of who approved which invoices in Q3, how long does it take to produce that evidence -- and how complete is it?

Approvals that live in someone's email inbox are not a workflow -- they are a process that stops every time that person is on leave.

Approval workflows route decisions to the right person at the right time, track their status, enforce deadlines, and escalate when approvals stall. When approvals happen over email, the status is invisible to anyone not on the thread -- the requester doesn't know if the approval is pending, rejected, or simply forgotten. Finance doesn't know which invoices are waiting. Procurement doesn't know which purchase orders are approved.

RaftLabs builds approval workflow software with configurable routing rules, approval tiers, SLA monitoring, escalation logic, and a status view that shows where every item in the workflow currently sits. For invoice approval, purchase order sign-off, contract review, expense authorisation, HR requests, and any other process that requires a documented decision trail.

  • Configurable approval routing -- by value, by department, by vendor, or by any business rule your process requires

  • SLA monitoring with automatic escalation when an approval hasn't moved within the configured time limit

  • Full audit trail for every approval decision -- who approved, when, and any comments recorded at the time

  • Requestor-facing status view showing where their item is in the approval chain without emailing the approver

RaftLabs builds approval workflow software -- configurable routing rules, SLA monitoring, escalation logic, audit trail, and status visibility -- for invoice approval, purchase orders, contracts, expenses, and HR requests. Custom-built or integrated with your existing systems. Most projects deliver in 6 to 12 weeks at a fixed cost.

Vodafone
Aldi
Nike
Microsoft
Heineken
Cisco
Calorgas
Energia Rewards
GE
Bank of America
T-Mobile
Valero
Techstars
East Ventures

Approval workflows break down when the process lives entirely in email. The requester sends a request, the approver receives an email, the email sits unread or gets buried, and the SLA expires without anyone noticing. The finance manager has no visibility into which invoices are awaiting sign-off. The procurement team has no way to see which purchase orders are stuck. The auditor, six months later, is given a spreadsheet that may or may not reflect what actually happened.

The cost of a broken approval process is measured in delayed payments, missed procurement deadlines, compliance gaps, and the time spent by managers chasing approvals that should have been routed, tracked, and escalated automatically. Approval workflow software replaces email chains with a structured process that routes, tracks, escalates, and records every decision from submission to sign-off.

What we build

Configurable approval routing

Approval routing rules based on request attributes: amount thresholds, department, vendor, risk category, or any other field on the request. Single-level and multi-level approval chains supported. Sequential approval sends the item to each approver in order after the previous approves. Parallel approval sends to multiple approvers simultaneously and advances when all have responded. Conditional routing changes the approval chain based on request properties -- a contract above a value threshold routes to legal in addition to finance, while one below routes to finance only.

SLA monitoring and escalation

SLA configuration per approval step: how long the approver has before the item is overdue. Escalation rules when SLA is breached: notify the approver's manager, reassign to a backup approver, or trigger a separate escalation workflow. Multiple escalation tiers for items that remain unresolved after the first escalation. SLA performance reporting shows average approval time by step and by approver, identifying individual and process bottlenecks. Overdue approval dashboard gives approval managers a live view of what is stalling and how long it has been waiting.

Audit trail and decision record

Immutable log of every action on every approval item: submitted, approved, rejected, escalated, reassigned, commented. Approver identity, timestamp, and IP address recorded for each action. Comments and supporting documentation attached to approval decisions and stored with the record. Audit report exportable by date range, approver, request type, or amount -- so producing a compliance evidence pack for an auditor is a report run, not a manual reconstruction. No approval decision can be removed or altered after it is recorded.

Requestor and approver dashboards

Requestor dashboard showing all items submitted, their current approval step, and expected completion date based on SLA. Approver dashboard showing items pending approval with SLA status and priority order. Manager dashboard showing team approval workload, individual approver SLA compliance, and items currently overdue. Notification preferences configurable per user -- email, Slack, Teams, or in-app -- so approvers receive requests through the channel they actually monitor rather than a system they check infrequently.

Rejection and revision workflow

Rejection with mandatory rejection reason recorded in the audit trail. Requestor notification with the rejection reason and instructions for resubmission where appropriate. Revision workflow allowing the requestor to update and resubmit the item without creating a new request from scratch. Revision history showing what changed between submission versions for the approver's reference. Optional partial approval for items where approving a subset of the request is valid -- a purchase order where three of five line items are approved and two are rejected, each line item tracked separately.

Integration with source systems

Approval trigger from the system where the item originates: ERP invoice, procurement system purchase order, expense management tool, HR system employee change request. Approval decision pushed back to the originating system to update the record status without manual data entry. Document retrieval from document management systems so approvers can review the supporting document without leaving the approval interface. Single sign-on so approvers authenticate with the same credentials as their other business tools rather than managing a separate login.

Have an approval workflow project?

Tell us the approval process you need to automate, the routing rules, and where the current process stalls. We'll scope the workflow and give you a fixed cost.

Talk about your approval workflow project

Frequently asked questions

Yes. Threshold-based routing is a standard approval workflow pattern: a purchase order under $5,000 routes to the department manager, $5,000 to $25,000 routes to the department manager and finance director, above $25,000 routes to the CFO. Risk-based routing works the same way with risk score as the routing attribute. Routing rules are configured during setup and can be modified by an administrator without code changes. Multiple routing attributes can be combined -- amount AND vendor type AND department all influencing the approval chain.

Absence handling is configured per approver: a delegate approver for planned absence (holiday, parental leave) who receives approval tasks during the absence period, or automatic escalation to the approver's manager when an SLA expires without action. Delegates are configured in the system by the approver before their absence. For unexpected absence, the SLA escalation path handles the routing automatically without manual intervention. The audit trail records that the delegate or escalation approver acted on behalf of the original approver.

A focused approval workflow covering a single approval type (invoice approval or purchase order sign-off) with configurable routing, SLA monitoring, and audit trail typically takes 6 to 8 weeks. A more complete system covering multiple approval types, complex routing logic, integration with ERP or procurement systems, and a manager analytics dashboard typically takes 10 to 16 weeks. Fixed cost agreed before development starts.

Yes. Integration with the source system -- the ERP that generates invoices, the procurement system that creates purchase orders, the HR system that initiates employee change requests -- means approval items are created automatically from the source system rather than entered separately. Approval decisions are pushed back to the source system to update the record status. The integration scope depends on what APIs your source systems expose and is assessed during the project scoping.