Email approvals are quietly costing you hours.
Here's what to replace them with.

Email approvals work fine at low volume. They quietly break at scale, and the cost shows up as missed deadlines, lost requests, and "I thought you approved that?" moments. Here's how to replace them with a workflow that holds up.

The hidden cost of email approvals

Picture a typical week. Someone sends a purchase request to their manager. The manager forwards it to finance for sign-off. Finance asks a clarifying question, the requester answers, the manager loops back in. Two days later the original requester is asking, "Hey, is this approved yet?"

Each one of those round trips is two to ten minutes of someone's attention. Multiply by the number of approvals running through your business in any given week and you have hours, often a full workday, lost to coordination overhead. None of it is captured anywhere. None of it is reportable. None of it survives turnover.

The real cost shows up in three places:

• Things get dropped. Email threads get buried, forwarded to the wrong person, or sent while someone is on PTO. Without a status, a reminder, or an escalation, they sit until someone notices, which is usually after the deadline.
• You cannot answer "where is it?" Without a single status field, the only way to know is to ask whoever you think has it next. That ask itself becomes part of the cost.
• You have no audit trail. When something goes wrong (a vendor disputes an order, an auditor asks who approved a discount, a team member claims they were never told), the only record is whatever email threads anyone happens to have kept.

Before

SERAPHSOLUTIONS

OperationalExcellence

After

What a designed digital workflow actually does

A real approval workflow has four elements email does not give you by default:

1. Named ownership at every step. Each approval step has a specific person responsible. Not "the finance team," not "whoever sees it first." A named individual whose queue this lives in until they act.

2. Live status the requester can see. The person who submitted the request can see exactly where it is right now without asking anyone. "Awaiting manager approval" or "Awaiting finance review, escalated yesterday" or "Approved, see ticket details."

3. Routing rules baked in. The workflow knows where to send it next based on the request type, the dollar amount, the requester's department. The routing is not in someone's head, it is in the workflow.

4. A permanent record of every action. Who approved what, when, with what comment, in what order. Not searchable through email folders. A real audit trail.

Five signs your approval process is broken

If two or more of these are true for your business, email approvals are quietly costing you real money:

• You cannot answer "where does this request stand?" without asking somebody.
• Approvals routinely sit longer than they should because nobody knows whose turn it is.
• You have at least one "I thought that was approved" or "nobody told me about that" story per quarter.
• When someone leaves the company or goes on vacation, in-flight approvals stall because nobody else has visibility.
• You cannot pull a list of all approvals from the last 30 days, what they were for, who approved them, and when.

What to look for in an approval workflow tool

The good news for SMBs: you almost certainly do not need a new tool. The approval workflow probably lives in something you already pay for.

If you are on Microsoft 365

Power Automate (formerly Microsoft Flow) handles most SMB approval needs natively. The approval requests show up in Outlook and Teams, the approver clicks Approve or Reject inline, the requester sees the status in real time. No new bills, no new logins. This is usually the lowest-friction path.

If you are on Monday.com or ClickUp

Both platforms have native approval automations. You can set up "when a request is submitted to this board, send to manager X for approval, then to finance Y, then notify requester." The approver sees the request in the tool they already use. See our Monday vs ClickUp comparison for trade-offs.

If you are on a sector-specific platform

Procore (construction), ServiceNow (IT operations), and most industry-specific platforms have approval flows built in for the patterns common in your sector (RFI approvals, change orders, ticket escalations). Use what is already there before adding a new tool.

When a dedicated approval tool makes sense

Standalone approval platforms (Kissflow, Approval Studio, ProcessMaker) are worth considering only when you have many approval flows running across multiple systems and the coordination overhead between them is itself the problem. Most SMBs are not there yet.

Build vs. buy

Custom-built approval workflows are rarely worth it for SMBs. Off-the-shelf tools cover the common patterns (sequential approval, parallel approval, conditional routing by amount or type, escalation on timeout) and the integrations you need (email, Teams, Slack, your existing systems).

The exception is when your approval process is genuinely unique and bending an off-the-shelf tool to fit costs more than building exactly what you need. That is rare. If a vendor is telling you that you need a custom build for a normal approval workflow, get a second opinion.

A 30/60/90 plan

If you are committing to replacing email approvals for one workflow, a realistic timeline:

Days 1 to 30: Map and choose. Pick the highest-volume approval flow you have. Map the actual rules (who approves what, when does it escalate, what are the exception cases). Pick the tool. Build the first version.

Days 31 to 60: Pilot and iterate. Run it with a small group. Find the friction (the rules you forgot, the edge cases, the approvers who do not show up). Refine. Add the automations that earn their keep (reminders, escalation on timeout, manager-out-of-office reroute).

Days 61 to 90: Switch off email and stabilize. Set a clear date. Communicate it. Make the new workflow the only path. Track adoption and time-to-approval. Document the workflow so it survives turnover.

What to expect after

If the rollout works, three things change inside the first 60 days:

• Time-to-approval drops, usually by 30 to 60 percent, because reminders fire automatically and nothing sits in a forgotten inbox.
• "Where does this stand?" questions to your team drop to near zero, because the requester can see the status themselves.
• You get reportable data for the first time. Average time per approval, approver bottlenecks, exception rates. That data drives the next round of improvements.

Benjamin Burns

Founder & CEO, Seraph Solutions LLC · 20+ years operator-side in manufacturing, defense, and federal program management.

PMP · LSS Black Belt · ITIL 4 · TS/SCI