Expense approval delegation and escalation router
Problem
Expense approvals move by email, addressed to one named approver. When that person is travelling with the team or simply out of office, the request sits unopened in their inbox, and the person who submitted it has no way to prompt anyone else. Budget holders chase progress through a messaging group, asking whether anyone has seen a claim, because the finance system shows individual inboxes rather than a queue. Accounts payable clerks work month end against whatever has cleared and hold the rest over, so spend lands in the wrong period. Nobody has a record of who was supposed to approve what by when, only a thread of forwarded emails and a spreadsheet tab someone updates from memory.
Product idea
A workflow that sits in front of the expense system and owns the approval step, not the payment. Each claim is routed to the approver named against the delegated authority list; if it is not opened within a set window, it reassigns automatically to the named backup for that limit and logs the reassignment against both names. An approver travelling can set an out-of-office window in advance, and the router honours it without anyone editing a spreadsheet. A budget holder gets one view of every claim against their budget and its current state, open, approved or overdue, instead of asking in a chat. It deliberately does not process payment or post to the ledger; it decides who acts next and makes sure they do.
Who it is for
Finance managers and financial controllers who set the delegation rules, budget holders who need claim status without asking, and accounts payable clerks who currently chase approvals before they can pay anything.
Possible first version
A web app that imports claims from a CSV export of the existing expense tool, applies a configured approval hierarchy and delegated authority limits, and routes each claim to the named approver with a time-boxed reassignment to a backup. Approvers act through a simple queue and email notification; budget holders see a status view of claims against their budget. Out of scope for version one: any live integration with the expense or ERP system, which stays a manual export and import, and any payment or ledger posting, which remains entirely with the existing finance system.
- Build classification
- Workflow application
- Rough effort
- 4-6 week first release
- Roles involved
- Finance manager, Financial controller, Budget holder, Accounts payable clerk
- Relevant to
- Professional club, League office, Federation / governing body, Venue & stadium operator, Collegiate athletics
- Systems in play
- Expense management tools, Finance and ERP systems, Messaging apps
- Product framing
- Automate a workflow
Questions we get asked
What do we need to have ready before this can even start?
A delegated authority list mapping each approver to their spend limit and their backup, and an export of open or recent claims to test routing against. Many finance teams have this informally, in policy documents or in someone's head, but not in a form a system can read. Getting that list written down properly is usually the first week of work, before any build starts.
Does this replace our expense system or our ERP?
No. It sits in front of whichever expense tool or finance and ERP system you already use and owns only the approval step. Version one moves claims by export and import rather than a live connection, so the payment record, the ledger and the audit trail all stay exactly where they are now.
Our approvers already forward the email to whoever is covering for them. Why build this?
Forwarding depends on the approver remembering to do it before they disappear, and it leaves no record that a reassignment happened or when. A claim can sit for days because the cover person did not know to check. This does the same job automatically, on a fixed clock, and logs who actually approved what against the original approver's name.
Who keeps the delegation rules current, and what does that cost them in time?
Usually the finance manager or controller, and the cost is real: every change in personnel, spend limit or reporting line needs the list updated, or claims start routing to the wrong person. It is a smaller job than chasing approvals by hand, but it is not zero, and if nobody owns it the routing quietly goes stale.
Is this your workflow?
Tell us one sports workflow that still runs on paper, spreadsheets, WhatsApp or an outdated system. We will map it and show you what a simpler product looks like.
Tell us about itMore in Finance, procurement & vendors
- Consolidated supplier spend reporting across cost centresA reporting tool that merges purchase order and invoice spend by supplier across cost centres and departments, with a plain-language query box to ask what was actually spent.
- Delegated approval authority register and expiry trackerA register that tracks who holds delegated financial approval authority and at what threshold, flags entries before they lapse, and exports audit-ready evidence instead of a scramble through old emails.
- Invoice to purchase order match and exception queueA rules-driven workflow that matches invoice lines to purchase orders automatically and routes only the mismatches to a queue, instead of a clerk checking every line by eye.