Most companies are still doing approvals the old fashion way, passing paper around waiting for signatures, or possibly sending emails and losing track of what is approved. An invoice sits on someone’s desk for days before it can be paid, or you have to sort through never-ending email chains to determine who authorized a purchase.
Luckily there’s a solution: Gravity Software’s approval workflows. Learn more about how these workflows use the Microsoft Power Platform to streamline the approval process.
How much time do you waste on waiting for approvals?
Companies with advanced technologies have surprisingly antiquated processes for managing approvals. Sales reps turn in their expense reports, then print them out and leave them on a manager’s desk or send them by email, where they might wait for a week while someone is out of town. By the time the expense is approved, you have to scramble to reimburse it and submit month-end reports on time.
Expense approvals also experience delays going back and forth between department managers or buyers and members of the executive team. The senior buyer emails back and asks to see the details of the prospective transaction. There are negotiations on price and quantities, leading to numerous emails over several weeks. By the time you’ve confirmed approval, the manufacturer's discount has ended.
Managing approvals within family offices is another common scenario. An executive assistant with an eye for design is authorized to purchase artwork, but they need the approval of several others before the head of accounting can finalize the purchase.
Can you manage approval workflows in QuickBooks?
Many companies have moved past paper invoices or reports, and many entry-level accounting solutions, like QuickBooks, do come with automated approval workflows. While these can help prevent your company's department heads and executives from being buried in mountains of paper, they leave much to be desired in terms of the flexibility needed to avoid chaotic, confusing flurries of emails like in the scenario above. Most approval workflows that come with entry-level accounting solutions allow users to set the amount requiring approval and the person who needs to approve the invoice or purchase — and not much else.
You may have considered accounts payable approval software, but adding another layer to your technology stack isn’t necessarily ideal, especially if most of the people who manage approvals don’t want to have to remember yet another password or learn a new system.
How do Gravity's approval workflows differ?
Gravity Software works differently. Because Gravity is natively built on the Microsoft Power platform, our approval workflows are built on Microsoft Power Automate, making it easy to tailor them to suit your particular business. With Gravity, you can route approvals by department, by entity, or even based on more granular details such as vendor. There are also multiple ways to build approval workflows.
Email approval workflows are ideal for companies that require approvals from many different people who may not be familiar with accounting software. For instance, your nonprofit receives a vendor invoice for $5,000 for catering services for your annual fundraising gala. This amount requires approval from the CFO, the CEO and the head of the board of trustees' finance committee before it can be paid. Without an automated workflow, your steps to obtain emailed approval are:
- Enter the invoice into your accounting software.
- Open your email window and type out a message asking the CFO, CEO and board member to approve payment of the invoice
- Prepare and attach any necessary documentation.
- Wait for and keep track of responses from all three parties.
- Once approval is provided, find the invoice in question and enter the amount into accounts payable.
With Gravity's approval workflows, the process has far fewer steps. When you enter a vendor invoice or purchase order in Gravity, it can be automatically routed via email to the right individuals – something that has been a game-changer for the British Institute of Innkeeping, a hospitality trade association. Before switching to Gravity Software, getting approvals for purchase orders involved keeping track of a long chain of emails between department leaders, executive team members, board members and trustees. With Gravity's help, the organization built workflows that automatically send purchase orders over a certain amount to the appropriate people for approval. They can then either approve or reject the purchase without the need to log into Gravity.
Dashboards
If your company has many approvals dependent on a few department heads or executives, and those company leaders have access to Gravity, then dashboard approval workflows are an efficient way to cut down on email inbox clutter. Instead of wading through dozens of approval emails each week, leaders can log in to Gravity and see all pending approvals at one time. They can approve them quickly by checking a box, or they can drill down for more information about each invoice, expense or purchase order. This method of approval is ideal for healthcare companies, family offices, larger nonprofits or other organizations with a high volume of transactions requiring a signoff.
Microsoft Teams
If your company utilizes Microsoft Teams, which integrates seamlessly with Gravity, users can see all of their pending approvals as an icon in their Teams navigation. The benefits of this type of approval workflow are twofold: it does not require approvers to be logged into Gravity, and approvals can happen quickly because assigned approvers are already likely to be engaging with Teams in their normal course of work.
Gravity elevates approval workflows
Whether you use email, dashboard or Teams-based approval workflows — or some combination of the three — there are a few things you can always count on when creating approval workflows in Gravity Software.
Efficiency
The automation in one of Gravity's approval workflows doesn't just apply to the front end of the process. Once approval is granted on a vendor invoice, for instance, the workflow can automatically post the invoice amount in accounts payable so your accounting team can take care of it. Team members can devote themselves to other meaningful tasks rather than interrupting their train of thought to make sure a newly approved invoice gets where it needs to go.
Security
Responses to approval messages are automatically recorded as a full audit trail, so you can easily look at a transaction to see who signed off on what, and when. You can also attach PDFs to an approval request so approvers can see exactly what they're being asked to greenlight, ensuring complete transparency in every transaction.
Flexibility
With Gravity, your approval workflow choices aren't limited to a set number of pre-defined pathways that are built into the solution. You have Power Automate in its entirety at your disposal, meaning you can create custom approval workflows that sync with the unique way your business operates. You can create approval workflows that:
- Give assigned approvers the option to either accept or reject the item in question, advancing to the next step only when all of the approvers have hit "accept."
- Give assigned approvers the accept/reject option, advancing as soon as one approver accepts.
- Define custom options for approvers to choose from.
- Move on to a different approver if the originally assigned approver has an "out of office" message.
See for yourself how Gravity's approval workflows can streamline your company's operations. Schedule a demo today!
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