Why the best time to set up AP controls is before you think you need them
Nobody plans for their AP process to break. It just quietly stops working.
At five people, approvals are simple. Everyone knows who handles what. The founder reviews invoices over coffee, signs off on spend in real time, and the books stay clean. At twenty people, things get busier but manageable. At fifty, something shifts. The process that felt effortless at ten people now takes hours to manage. Finance is chasing approvals, suppliers are chasing payments, and nobody is entirely sure who signed off on what.
The process didn’t fail overnight. It was outgrown.
A recent ApprovalMax webinar explored exactly this pattern: how AP controls evolve as businesses grow, where they typically start to crack, and what finance teams can do before the cracks become costly.
• Visibility breaks before control does. Finance teams lose track of what’s been approved, what’s pending, and who’s responsible long before formal controls actually fail.
• Informal approvals create structural risk. Informal approvals (email, Slack, verbal) seem efficient but create structural risk: they lack an audit trail and don't scale.• The signs not to miss. People asking “who approves this?”, and delayed payments are all process problems, not people problems.
• Control and speed aren’t opposites. The goal is a process where the right decisions happen faster.
• Automation replaces coordination, not judgment. Structured workflows correctly route requests, send reminders, and maintain an audit trail without manual overhead.
Visibility goes first. Control goes second.
When AP processes start to strain, the first thing finance teams lose isn’t control. It’s visibility.
They lose track of what’s been approved. They lose track of what’s pending. They lose track of who is responsible for what. And once visibility is gone, control follows quickly. Because you can’t enforce a process you can’t see.
This is the part that catches most businesses off guard. The process hasn’t formally failed. There’s no single invoice that caused the problem. But when finance spends more time chasing approvals, fixing mistakes, and answering questions than it does on analysis, planning, and decision support, the process has already outgrown the team.
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Approval processes move outside the accounting system (to email, Slack, or Teams).
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Finance starts chasing approvals manually.
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Visibility drops.
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Errors increase.
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Controls weaken. By the time it shows up in reporting, the process has been fragmented for months.
The warning signs are process problems, not people problems
There are a few reliable signals that your AP process is no longer keeping up:
- People regularly ask “who approves this?” and get different answers depending on who they ask.
- Finance is manually routing invoices to the right person, rather than the system handling it.
- Payments are delayed not because of cash flow, but because approvals are stuck in someone’s inbox.
- There’s confusion around responsibility. More than one person can say “I thought someone else handled that.”
None of these are signs of bad people. They’re signs of a process that was designed for a smaller, simpler version of the business. The team didn’t fail. The process didn’t keep up.
Informal approvals feel efficient. They aren’t.
When approvals move outside the system, they tend to move into wherever communication already happens. Email threads. Slack messages. Teams chats. Sometimes verbal confirmations in a hallway or on a call.
These feel fast. And for individual transactions, they often are. But they create three problems that compound over time.
First, there’s no audit trail. If an auditor or a board member asks who approved a specific invoice six months ago, the answer is buried in someone’s inbox. Or it doesn’t exist at all.
Second, there’s no consistency. Different managers apply different standards. Some approve everything quickly. Others sit on requests for days. The same type of spend can follow completely different paths depending on who handles it.
Third, there’s no separation of duties. Without a structured workflow, the same person can end up requesting, approving, and paying a transaction. That’s not just an efficiency issue. It’s a risk issue.
The risk here isn’t necessarily intentional. It’s structural. Weak processes create gaps, and gaps create exposure.
You shouldn’t have to choose between control and speed
This is where many growing businesses get stuck. They recognize the process is breaking, but they worry that adding controls will slow things down. So they delay. They add another workaround. They promise to “fix it next quarter.”
But the trade-off between control and speed is largely a false one. It exists when controls are manual, because manual controls require human coordination. Every additional step adds delay, adds friction, adds another thing for someone to remember.
Automation changes the equation. A structured workflow in a tool like ApprovalMax routes requests to the right person automatically, sends reminders without anyone chasing, and maintains a complete audit trail for every transaction. The right decisions still happen. They just happen faster, because the system handles the coordination that used to fall on the finance team.
That’s the real shift. Not from manual to automated. From reactive to proactive. From fragmented to structured. From hoping someone remembers to knowing the process will enforce itself.
Where to start if your process is already straining
If any of this sounds familiar, the fix doesn’t have to be a full system overhaul. Start with the basics:
- Map how approvals actually happen today. Not the official process. The real one. Follow an invoice from receipt to payment and note every handoff, every email, every delay.
- Identify where visibility breaks. Can finance see, at any given moment, what’s been approved, what’s pending, and who’s responsible? If the answer is no, that’s the first thing to fix.
- Define clear ownership. Every type of spend should have a clear approver at every threshold. If you have to ask “who handles this?” the process needs tightening.
- Separate duties intentionally. Make sure the person requesting spend is not the same person approving or paying it. This doesn’t require complexity. It requires clarity.
- Introduce structure before you introduce scale. It’s far easier to build good habits with 20 invoices a week than with 200. The businesses that handle growth smoothly are usually the ones that structured their AP process before they needed to.
If approvals happen outside your system, you don’t have control. You have hope. And hope doesn’t scale.
This article is based on a ApprovalMax webinar exploring how AP controls evolve and break as businesses grow. Watch the full recording here.
