How to create an approval process workflow

An approval process workflow is a structured, repeatable system that routes decisions through the right people without relying on email threads or shoulder taps. If you’re dealing with slow approvals right now, the fix isn’t “better email habits” — it’s moving to a centralized workflow tool that tracks every request automatically.

Whether you’re submitting a report, publishing an article, greenlighting a project plan, or making just about any major business decision — somebody senior needs to review and approve it. That’s true whether you’re a 10-person startup or a public corporation.

Here’s where it gets frustrating. Most companies still use email for approvals. It’s slow. It’s messy. It’s basically guaranteed to fail at scale.

Management gets hundreds of approval requests per day. Some get lost in the inbox. Some sit there for weeks. And while those requests gather dust, entire teams stall out waiting for a decision. At Tallyfy, we’ve seen this firsthand — approval delays don’t just slow one person down, they cascade through entire teams. On one side, you’ve got bottlenecks preventing people from doing their jobs. On the other, you’ve got a two-week backlog of pending approvals that keeps growing. So if your approval process is already broken — scattered across email, Slack, and sticky notes — throwing AI or automation at it just means you’ll create broken outcomes faster. You need the right structure first.

What an approval process actually is

An approval process is exactly what it sounds like — getting someone in authority to sign off on something. Could be publishing a blog post. Could be kicking off a million-dollar project. The “process” part is the specific sequence of actions needed to get that sign-off.

For a small business with four or five people? Dead simple. Walk over to the CEO’s desk. Done.

But once you start scaling, things get complicated fast. You go from a handful of approval requests per day to hundreds. Sometimes thousands.

So how do you make it work? You create approval workflows — automated systems that route the right request to the right person at the right time.

In our experience with workflow automation, the organizations that struggle most aren’t the ones with complex approval chains. They’re the ones with no defined process at all. Everything runs on institutional memory and ad-hoc email threads.

If approval bottlenecks are eating your team alive right now, here’s how Tallyfy can help you get things flowing again without the email chaos.

Is approval chaos sustainable?

Anatomy of an approval workflow

While the specifics differ by industry, every approval process shares a common structure. You can adapt this skeleton to your needs.

Submission

The process starts when someone submits a document — a purchase order, an invoice, a project proposal, a content draft. You’ll want an online portal or form where people submit these, not an email thread that gets buried.

Say you run a furniture company and you’ve received a distribution proposal from a logistics provider. The moment that proposal hits your submission portal, the approval process kicks off.

Assigning approvers

Can’t have an approval process without approvers, right? With approval automations, you can set up rules that automatically route requests to the correct person based on type, value, or department.

This matters because in bigger organizations, you wouldn’t bother the CEO with a printer purchase. But you’d absolutely want them signing off on annual bonuses.

We’ve observed that the most common mistake here is making everyone an approver on everything. That’s how you end up with six people who all think someone else will handle it.

Approval workflow templates to get started

Example Procedure

Multi-Tier Purchase Approval Authority Matrix Workflow

1Supplier approval (Tier 1 - Manager Level)

2Purchase authorization (Tier 2 - Director Level)

3Vendor acknowledgement and PO confirmation

4Define approval thresholds by tier

5Assign approvers by role and backup coverage

+3 more steps

View template

Example Procedure

Client Content Approval

1Gather content requirements

2Create Draft 1

3Approve Draft 1

4Create Draft 2

5Approve Draft 2 (Client)

+10 more steps

View template

Example Procedure

Contract Review & Legal Approval Workflow

1Collect information

2Prepare quote/proposal

3Send Quote

4Proposal meeting

5Quote Variation

+4 more steps

View template

Why email-based approvals break down

A workflow is a process executed through software. Instead of looking up the approval process in a wiki, then executing it through email, you launch the workflow in a dedicated tool and it handles the routing for you.

Workflow management software gives you a centralized hub for all your approval workflows. You can also build approval processes using process templates.

For the person submitting a request, the system provides clear instructions on what’s needed. For management, there’s a dashboard showing every open request and its status.

Without software, you’re stuck using email. And email is the opposite of centralized. You flood the C-suite’s inbox with approval requests. They have to sort through dozens of messages looking for the right one. Whatever you need approved gets delayed indefinitely.

This isn’t good for anyone.

Honestly, it drives me a little crazy. The fix is so straightforward — put all approvals in one place where nothing gets lost — and yet most organizations keep defaulting to email because “that’s how we’ve always done it.”

The AI agent gold rush has a missing ingredient: actual workflows. Right now, nobody’s building the workflows those agents need to follow. But approval workflows are exactly the kind of structured, repeatable process that AI agents can eventually execute — if the foundation exists.

Setting up approval workflows in practice

The exact steps depend on which software you pick. For the sake of this walkthrough, I’ll cover how it works in Tallyfy.

First, create an account. Unlike most workflow software solutions, Tallyfy is free for up to 5 users, so it’s genuinely easy to start.

Then invite the relevant people. Click “new” and pick “invite co-worker.” Before you go all-in on every process, though, start with one specific approval workflow. Get that right first.

Head to “templates” and pick “create process template.” From there, you’ll define:

• What gets submitted — the form fields, documents, or information needed
• Who approves it — individual approvers, groups, or conditional routing based on rules
• What happens after — next steps, notifications, escalations if someone doesn’t respond in time
• Deadlines — how long each approver has before the request escalates

In discussions we’ve had with operations teams, the sweet spot is starting with your most painful approval bottleneck. Fix that one first. Build confidence. Then expand.

One thing people overlook: you don’t need to redesign your entire approval chain on day one. Map the current process — even if it’s messy — into the tool. Then iterate. The visibility alone will show you where the real delays are hiding.

I’d also suggest setting up escalation rules from the start. If an approver doesn’t respond within 48 hours, the request should automatically move to a backup approver or trigger a notification. We’ve seen approval cycles shrink by more than half just by adding this one rule.

Going beyond approvals

Approvals are just one type of workflow you can build. To get the real value out of workflow management software, apply the same thinking to other repeatable processes.

In our conversations, these use cases come up repeatedly:

• Employee onboarding — Every organization does it, most don’t have a structured process, and we’ve seen teams that formalized their onboarding in Tallyfy cut their pre-onboarding time from one to two weeks down to two to three days by automating task assignments across finance, timekeeping, security, and IT
• Content marketing — If you’re publishing a lot of content, the editorial pipeline can get chaotic fast, and we use our own software internally to make sure nothing gets stuck in a backlog
• Incident alert management — When something goes wrong, you need a response plan that’s already defined, not one you’re inventing on the spot, because having the workflow mapped out beforehand means you’re reacting in minutes, not hours
• Process improvement — Once you can see where approvals stall, you can start asking better questions like why does this step take three days, or does this approval even need to exist, because sometimes the best fix is removing a step entirely

The pattern is always the same. Define the process. Assign the right people. Automate the routing. Track everything in one place. That’s it. No magic. Just structure.