Whether you’re submitting a report, publishing an article, creating a project plan, or making just about any major business decision, you need senior management to review and approve it.
This holds true for organizations of any size – whether it’s an up-and-coming startup or a public corporation.
Most companies, though, use emails for approvals. This can be extremely tedious, slow and prone to error. The management can get bombarded with hundreds of approval requests per day, some of which are just bound to get lost in their inbox.
At a glance, this might not seem that big of a deal. They’ll get around to approving it at some point, right? Well, the thing is, this waiting period can really slow down your organization. On one hand, it might create bottlenecks – lack of approvals preventing your employees from doing their job.
On the other hand, the approvals might end up piling up. Worst-case scenario, you’d have to wait weeks for senior management to get around something you asked for right now, simply because they’ve already got approvals pending for the past 2 weeks.
This holds especially true if you’re scaling or expanding your organization. The more decisions the management has to make, the slower approvals will become.
In order to prevent all this from happening, you can use workflow management software to create approval workflows. Also read – What is a workflow?
In this guide, we’re going to teach you how to do just that.
What’s an Approval Process
An approval process is an act of getting management approval on, well, just about anything. This can be for publishing a new article on the company blog or kick-starting a new project.
The “process” part means the exact actions you need to take in order to get the approval. For kick-starting a new project, for example, you might need to send the project plan and budget to the CEO and CFO.
For publishing an article, it would mean a review and approval from the editor.
For a small business with 4-5 employees, approval processes are super straightforward. You just tap the CEO on the shoulder and ask, “hey, is it cool if I do X?”
Once you start scaling your business, though, it gets a lot more complicated. You go from a handful of approval requests per day to hundreds, sometimes even thousands.
So, how do you make your approval processes efficient? You need to create approval workflows.
In a nutshell, an approval workflow is an automated approval process. Here’s how to create one…
Structure of an Approval Process
While the content of an approval process will differ based on the industry, there is a general structure you can follow. You can then of course, adapt it to your needs.
Here are the different elements of an Approval Process:
Submission (document, invoice, etc)
The approval process begins with someone submitting a document such as purchase order, an air waybill (in air transport), a bill of lading (maritime transport) , or an invoice. You can create an online platform or portal for users to submit the relevant documents.
For example, you are a company that produces furniture and needs distribution services. They receive a proposal from a local transportation company with details of the services they can provide and the respective quote.
The moment this proposal is submitted by the designated person the approval process begins.
Assigning Approvers
It can’t be an approval process without approvers, right?
When establishing your approval process, you need to assign approvers that are relevant to the question. In bigger companies for example, you wouldn’t bother higher management with decisions about purchasing a new printer.
You would however, want to have them as primary approvers if the company needs to decide on the yearly bonuses.
How to Create an Approval Workflow
A workflow is a process executed through software. Meaning, rather than having to look up what’s the process online & execute it through email, you launch the relevant approval workflow through workflow software.
Workflow management software is a centralized hub to manage all of your company approval workflows. Also visit approval management software.
For the employee, the system gives out the exact instructions on how to execute the workflow.
On the other side of the coin, you also have a dashboard for the management team of all the workflows going on.
Without the software, you have to use email, which is far from centralized. You end up flooding the C-suite’s inbox with approval requests. This isn’t good for anyone.
Management ends up having to sort through tons of emails looking for the right approval, while whatever you’re looking to get approved ends up being delayed to no end.
By using workflow management software, you’ll never have to deep dive into your inbox to find relevant emails ever again. You’ll have all the approvals right there in a central dashboard.
How to Use Workflow Software to Create Approval Workflows
Depending on which software provider you’re going with, the exact steps you’d need to take to create a workflow will vary. For the sake of the example, we’ll cover the exact steps you’d need to take to create approval workflows on the Tallyfy platform.
So, first things first, you’ll need to create an account. Unlike most workflow software solutions, Tallyfy is free for up to 5 users, so it’s very easy to get started. Head over here to register.
[screenshot]Then, you’ll need to invite all the relevant employees. You can do this by clicking “new” and picking “invite co-worker.”
[screenshot]Before you start using the software for all your workflows, though, you’ll need to start with one specific process. For the sake of the example, we’ll cover something basic like [example] process.
Head over to “templates” and pick “create process template.”
[instructions]Workflow Management Beyond Approvals
Approvals is just one type of workflow you can create using Workflow Management Software.
To really get the most out of the solution, you can also use it to make just about any business process more efficient, such as…
- Employee Onboarding – Every organization does employee onboarding. Most, however, don’t have a structured process for it. By using workflow management software to make the process more efficient, you can improve employee retention by up to X%.
- Content Marketing – If you’re publishing a lot of content, the entire process can be very hectic. At Tallyfy, we use our own software to ensure that all the content produced is posted on time & never lost in the backlog.
- Incident Alert Management – Whenever something goes wrong in your organization, you need to fix it ASAP. Having a set backup plan using software ensures that you’re always timely in reacting to any type of incidents.
