What is an approval workflow?

What is an approval workflow?

An approval workflow is a defined path where work stops at a named person before it can continue. A purchase request, a contract, a refund: each pauses where somebody clicks approve, reject, or send back. The rules are set in advance, so the same kind of request always lands with the same person, and every decision leaves a record.

The three shapes

Sequential: one approver at a time, in order. Finance only sees the request after the manager signs off.

Parallel: everyone gets it at once. Legal and finance review the same contract without waiting on each other.

Threshold-based: the amount picks the route. A contract under $10,000 goes to a manager, above that it escalates to a director. Most real setups mix them: legal and finance at the same time, then one final sign-off in order.

Where it jams

The approver goes on holiday and nothing routes around them. A request sitting in an inbox has no deadline, so it sits. One accounts payable benchmark puts average invoice processing at 17 days against 3.1 days for the fastest teams, and most of that gap is waiting on a person. Two rules cover it: a time limit that reassigns the request after three business days, and a named backup for every approver.

Skip the tooling if you approve a handful of things a week. A shared inbox is fine at that size. Build the real version the first time a request goes missing, or the first time you let an AI agent do work on its own. An approval step is what makes an agent safe to run unsupervised: it does the task, then stops at the actions you chose to hold back and waits for your yes.