When your business doubles your approvals shouldn’t
November 3, 2025

When your business doubles, your approvals shouldn’t

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To the Max
5 min read
Table of contents
Simplifying audit preparation guide

Learn how organised approvals and real-time audit data simplify audit preparation, cut review time, and give your team clearer oversight.

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Growth feels good until the operational reality sets in. When a business doubles in size, most teams brace for impact. More suppliers. More spend. More departments. More urgency. Naturally, most people assume the approval burden will double too.

But that is not what experienced finance leaders do. They design approval systems that stay steady while the business grows around them. Scale should increase clarity, not workload. Doubling the business should not mean doubling the chasing, checking and second guessing.

Here is how finance leaders keep approvals under control even when everything else gets bigger, faster and louder.

Key Takeaways

• Growth exposes weak approval habits long before revenue shows it.

• Approval volume should stay flat even as the business grows.

• Policy based routing scales better than people based routing.

• Visibility matters more than the number of approvers you add.

Why approvals explode during growth

Approvals feel manageable when volumes are small.
A manager remembers a supplier.
A CFO knows every department.
Invoices arrive slowly enough that nothing gets lost.

Then growth happens. Suddenly the team faces:

  • New suppliers every month
  • More people with spending power
  • More budget owners
  • Multiple projects running at once
  • A wider range of exceptions

Volume increases. So do mistakes. The time between receiving a bill and getting it approved stretches longer. The end of the month slows down. The CFO becomes the one person everyone needs. That is usually the moment teams realise the approval process was never designed. It simply grew on top of old habits.

According to research by ApprovalMax, most approval delays come from manual routing and unclear ownership. Growth amplifies that weakness. The volume is not the problem. The process is.

Approval work should not scale with revenue

High performing finance teams do not let approvals scale with the business. They set rules that stay stable whether the business processes one hundred invoices a month or a thousand.

The logic is simple. If your approval workload grows linearly with revenue, your system is built on human effort, not policy. It means you are relying on:

  • Email threads
  • Memory
  • Forwarding
  • Checking with managers
  • Following up repeatedly

This works in a small team, but it becomes chaos in a growing one. The approval burden should stay flat because the workflow, not the team, manages the routing.

Policy based approvals make growth feel calm

There is one habit shared by every finance leader who scales smoothly. They switch from people based approvals to policy based approvals.

People based approvals sound like:

  • “Send this to Emma, she always checks marketing invoices”
  • “Jacob signs off travel”
  • “Anything high value goes straight to the CFO”

Policy based approvals sound like:

  • “Marketing invoices under this amount route to the marketing manager”
  • “Legal needs to see all contracts”
  • “Spend over this threshold goes to the CFO by rule”

The difference is structural. People change roles. People take leave. People forget.
Policies don’t.

A software like ApprovalMax can help teams embed those policies so routing happens automatically. Approvers only receive what truly belongs to them. Volume increases, but their workload does not.

Clarity beats volume every time

The approval process breaks when people do not know where things sit. Growth just makes the gaps bigger.

Finance leaders focus on visibility across three levels. 

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Visibility into what is pending
Approvers need a single place that shows what requires their decision. Not a scattered set of emails. Not forwarded PDFs. One clean list.
Visibility into context
People approve faster when the data is right in front of them. Supplier name, coding, budget status, purchase order match, attachments. When context is missing, the process slows.
Visibility into the impact
Budget owners need to see how approvals affect spend, not just the invoice value. Visibility reduces back and forth and creates better decisions.

Teams that use ApprovalMax often see approval times drop simply because context is available. The work does not go faster. The thinking does.

Your CFO cannot be the shock absorber for growth

In most companies, the CFO is the person who prevents spend from slipping through the cracks. It works until the business grows. Then every approval becomes a question:

  • “Is this coded correctly?”
  • “Have we approved something like this before?”
  • “Who owns this?”
  • “Is this within the budget?”

Eventually the CFO becomes the blocker everyone waits for. It isn’t a leadership issue but rather a design issue.

CFOs who scale well do one thing right. They stop being the shock absorber for every exception. They set rules. They assign ownership. They design a system that does not need them at every step. Their role shifts from approving everything to approving what truly matters.

Growth requires consistency, not more people

When a company doubles, most teams feel pressure to hire. More volume means more hands. But approvals do not work that way. Adding more approvers usually adds:

  • More confusion
  • More delays
  • More exceptions
  • More questions

Scale does not come from headcount. It comes from discipline.

The teams who handle growth with confidence do the following:

  • They standardise coding
  • They create a clean approval matrix
  • They remove unnecessary steps
  • They enforce document attachment at the source
  • They keep rules simple so everyone can follow them

Growth becomes manageable when the process is consistent, no matter who triggers it.

A simple rule: approvals should be boring

If your approvals feel dramatic, rushed or unpredictable during growth, something is wrong.

Approvals should be:

  • Predictable
  • Consistent
  • Simple
  • Quick
  • Transparent

The real win is when people stop talking about approvals at all. No one asks where invoices went. No one forwards reminders. No one waits for context. The process becomes quiet. Quiet is the sign of a healthy system.

Growth exposes the process. It does not create the problem.

When companies double, they often think the problem is scale. In reality, growth only reveals what was already fragile.

If approvals rely on chasing, you will chase more.
If approvals rely on memory, you will forget more.
If approvals rely on a single person, that person will burn out.

Finance leaders who understand this protect their teams early. They build a workflow that absorbs the scale so the people do not have to.