Go With the Flow: 8 Tips for Smarter Approvals

Approvals are a necessary part of doing business — but all too often, they become the bottleneck. Whether you’re signing off a new order, approving an invoice for payment, or green-lighting a project, delays creep in when the process isn’t clear, consistent, or connected.

If you’re chasing people for sign-off, relying on email threads, or working from paper-based requests, it’s time to remove the friction. Here are 8 tips to help you create smarter, smoother, and more secure approval workflows.

1. Map Out the Process

Start by making the process visible by mapping out every stage. Who requests approval? Who needs to say yes — and in what order? Clear diagrams will help spot missing steps or duplicate efforts.

2. Route by Role, Not by Name

Avoid building workflows around specific people. Instead, assign approvals to job roles or departments. This will stop the processing from stalling when someone’s on leave or changes team.

3. Go Digital

If your approvals rely on printed documents being passed between desks or emailed back and forth, things can get delayed fast. Moving to a digital workflow — even for documents that start on paper — means approvals can happen anytime, anywhere, with a clear audit trail and fewer hold-ups. Your team won’t need to be in the office — or at their desk — to keep things moving.

Digitising paper documents using a scanner or multifunctional device (MFD) is often the first step in speeding things up.

4. Automate What You Can

You don’t always need to automate everything — focus on the steps that are predictable and repetitive. Automatically move documents to the next approver, send gentle reminders, and log actions for audit purposes.

And it’s worth it!

5. Make it Easy to Approve

Give decision-makers all the context they need, clearly and upfront. A simple summary, supporting documents, and a clear approve/reject button can save hours of back-and-forth.

6. Track and Improve

Monitor where and why delays happen. Look for repeat hold-ups and refine the process. Simple reports can help you spot what’s working and what’s not.

7. Design for Security

Approvals often involve sensitive or financial information. Make sure access is permission-based and all actions are recorded in a digital audit trail — not buried in someone’s inbox.

8. Build a Pro-Flow Culture

Tools alone won’t fix bottlenecks — it starts with people. To really make approvals run smoothly, you need a culture where sign-offs are treated as a priority, not a chore. Help your team understand why timely approvals matter, give them clarity on the process, and remove the friction that slows them down.

Then, equip them with the right tools and tech to make approvals quicker, more consistent, and less frustrating, so the whole business keeps moving.

Making Work Flow

At Agilico, we help make work easier by removing friction from everyday processes — like approvals.

If you’re dealing with slow sign-offs, lost paperwork, or unclear responsibilities, our digital tools can help streamline and secure your workflows:

Our Invu Document Management system captures, stores, and routes documents for approval automatically, with full visibility, secure permission-based access, and audit trails.

Verify, our Automated Invoice Processing solution, scans invoices as they arrive, automatically matches them with purchase orders and delivery notes, and routes them for to the right person for approval. It also works with your internal policies and business rules, such as auto-approving invoices under a set threshold once all matching and validation checks have passed, helping to reduce admin and speed up processing.

And for documents that still start life on paper, our Agilico Zero refurbished multifunctional devices (MFDs) make it easy to scan, capture and digitise, supporting faster approvals while also contributing to your sustainability goals.

By choosing a refurbished MFD, you’re helping to support the circular economy, reduce your environmental impact, and cut CO₂ emissions with each device saving up to 97.5% of CO₂ compared to buying new.

Every device is expertly refurbished to deliver high performance and reliability — so you’re not compromising on quality, just making smarter, greener choices.

Whether you’re approving invoices, documents or decisions, our solutions help make the process faster, safer and simpler — so your business keeps moving and your customers and suppliers get the timely responses they need.