Enterprise Manager’s Guide to Mobile Approvals

Manager approvals can be a real pain – you’re at your desk, trying to remember multiple passwords (SAP, Oracle, Workday, etc.), and you never have all the information you need. So, you put it off despite the fact that your direct reports, finance, and HR are hounding you for being the bottleneck.

This blog drives home the importance of approvals in a workplace and how a good mobile solution can be a gamechanger in making your approval process simpler, enabling an efficient, productive and a highly satisfied workforce.  

Challenges Managers Face in Approvals 

A typical manager works 50 hours a week, dedicating over 15 hours to administrative tasks and rubber-stamping requests. They need quick decisions to move on with their day, avoiding clunky approval processes. 

Why do we subject them to inefficient administrative tasks? 

We are all aware that approvals are put in place to serve as a company’s checks and balances, but since the process is so tedious, managers get frustrated when they are expected to complete them. 

In addition, approvals involve more than just compliance and controls. Executing crucial business processes, such as promptly accepting a sales discount to gain a customer’s business, expense reports for end-of-quarter reporting, or a purchase requisition essential for a quick time to market, might sometimes be criticized by some. A clunky approvals process that doesn’t move at the pace of the business creates a real operational lag and can impact a competitive advantage. 

What if approvals were as easy as tapping “Yes” “No” or “Need more info” on your smartphone?

Think of how much frustration you’d avoid. And how happy your teammates and direct reports would be if you could fulfill their requests quickly. 

Key Factors Affecting Handling Approvals

Time Intensiveness 

1. Expense reports: 50% of companies use manual systems (spreadsheets or pen and paper) for approving expense reports. 5. 38% say their biggest pain point is the time it takes to reconcile, review, and approve expenses. 
    

2. Purchase orders: 53% of businesses use email to approve purchase orders. 6. 50% of finance workers are unhappy with their company’s purchase order process. 

Compliance Risk

Automate mobile approvals and reduce compliance risks.

Employee Dissatisfaction

Factors causing the problem include employees’ workload, errors, and accountability. If your team spends its days asking for permission before executing, taking an hour to complete expense reports or time sheets, attending redundant meetings, or answering irrelevant emails, you’ve got a problem.

Best Practices to Adopt Mobile Approvals 

Simplify the Workflows

Most ERP-based approval processes are engineered with a lowest-common-denominator approach. They tend to expose all the fields and steps that might be required for the most complex approval, even though most approvals don’t require that many steps or nearly that much information. 
There are easy ways to adapt approval workflows with a “minimalist” approach, displaying just the necessary information and steps, depending on the type of approval.

Consolidate the Approval Requests

Large organizations often have multiple back-office applications for various approvals, such as expenses, timesheets, purchase orders, and credit memos. To streamline approval processes, businesses could provide a single integrated queue of approvals, similar to a “unified inbox” concept. This would eliminate the need for separate passwords and account information, allowing users to process all approvals in one place, reducing the complexity and nuances of each application. 

Automated Email Workflows

Automated email-based approvals are a partial solution, but they can clutter busy managers’ mailboxes and cause Finance to question if approvals were properly reviewed. “Flat” emails and system differences can create workflow bottlenecks, and cluttered inboxes do little to improve efficiency. 

Leverage Push Notification Functionality

Business moves quickly, and critical approval processes need to be accessible on mobile devices. Managers don’t want to have to access systems on laptops, networks, or VPNs. By making these processes available on mobile devices, time-consuming steps are eliminated. Managers can approve or deny approvals with a quick swipe, leveraging push notifications.

7 Benefits of Mobile App Approvals

Decision-support information – Approve or reject a request is available. 

1. Modern user experience: User-centric design principles. The app only includes regularly used functionality, and the interface is easy to use. 

2. Convenient delivery: Approve requests on any device with one-click access to all necessary details, eliminating the need for multiple apps or systems. 

3. Instant response: Approving a request is as easy as tapping your screen or clicking a button—no need to compose an email or customize your response. 

4. Fewer emails: Cutting email out of the approval process means no more internal requests clogging up your inbox and obscuring client or company emails. 

5. Less user error: Approval requests are provided by push notification and accessible via a Facebook-like feed. You no longer have to be worried about missing a deadline, accidentally deleting or failing to respond to emails. 

6. Minimal interruptions: On-the-spot approval requests keep meetings from being hijacked and disrupting your day. 
   It’s important because of changing competitiveness. Businesses are increasingly acting on information from anywhere without being coupled to location.  It helps companies remain in touch with customers, vendor and staff all the time. 

7. No more bottlenecks: Fast approvals keep workflows humming along—and you’ll never have to slog through a backlog of app requests again. 

Conclusion 

Approval processes are essential to every aspect of your organization, assisting in the governance of processes in finance, sales, operations, and human resources. We identified approvals as a recurrent difficulty in all businesses, regardless of size or industry. And we set out to provide a solution that allows time spent on administration to be re-invested in activities that will assist the organization achieve its goals. By enabling mobile approvals, make your organization more agile and your users happier, while ensuring that finance has the visibility and control needed to support the organization. Request a Demo for your Mobile Approvals solution.