As a business grows, so too does the volume of admin work and exposure to risk. One of the ways we help our clients to navigate this growth journey is to introduce the right automation tools from the get-go. The sooner these processes become part of the culture, the easier it is to keep your finances in check as you scale up.
As part of Fintech Friday, we talk a lot about automation. This month we’re looking at approval automation, and 4 reasons why now might be the time to take action.
1. You spend more than 30 minutes per week on approvals
Approval automation software enables you to build a well-defined approval matrix which is implemented by an automated approval workflow. With this in place, your time spent verifying if bills were authorised correctly should be minimal. In fact, you should only be reviewing a small number of exceptions.
2. You approve more than 30 bills or purchase orders per month
On average, approving 30+ bills per month results in an incremental increase in processing effort and time wasted. This is not an exact science; the volume may even be lower if you have a large number of approvers or a process that requires an audit trail for each decision.
3. You have more than 1 authorisation level
Multi-level authorisations are complicated. Parallel approvals, sequential approvals, lower-level, upper-level, delegated approvals etc etc. Approval automation removes the complexity of chasing approvers and tracking delayed approval decisions by following an automated workflow.
4. You have several remotely located budget holders or decision makers
The bigger or broader your business is, the more approval automation becomes a necessity. If you have approvers across multiple entities or multiple geographic locations, then approval automation makes getting approvals from the right people in the right places much less daunting.
Does your business tick any of these boxes? If yes, then it’s time to automate your approval process.
Why ApprovalMax?
As part of the digital advisory team at Harold Sharp, we work with ApprovalMax, as we think it’s the best on the market right now. It’s a cloud-based app that integrates with Xero and Quickbooks to replace email or paper approvals with fully automated approval workflows.
We’ve been working with ApprovalMax to help our clients create multi-level and multi-role approval workflows. These apply to purchase orders, bills, sales invoices and credit notes in Xero or Quickbooks, all of which can be approved on-the-go via the app. We recommend using ApprovalMax alongside Dext Prepare for end-to-end bill automation – that way, all supplier invoices that have been digitally captured by Dext Prepare go directly to ApprovalMax for authorisation.
Additional benefits include:
- Approvers only need access to the items they’re approving, so you can retain the integrity of your cloud-based accounting system
- Choose whether to receive approval request notifications via the website, mobile app, or email
- Auto approvals for smaller expenses
- Unlimited number of users
- No more missed emails
- No more time wasted searching for approvers
How can we help?
When we implement ApprovalMax for our clients our aim is two-fold – to help you to keep control of your spending and to cut time spent on approval trails. If this sounds like an attractive proposition, contact our digital advisory team direct or email fintech@haroldsharp.co.uk to discuss in more depth.