Most finance teams implement an expense approval workflow at some point
Fewer implement one that actually works. The gap between the two usually isn't about the technology — it's about the design decisions made before anyone opens a settings menu.
A well-designed approval workflow does three things: it gives employees clarity on what to expect and when, it gives managers enough visibility to catch problems without being overwhelmed by routine approvals, and it gives finance a documented trail they can use for reporting, audits, and dispute resolution. When any of those three are missing, the workflow degrades — slowly at first, then all at once, usually around the time a company scales past the point where informal systems held together by institutional memory still work.
This guide covers how to design expense approval workflows that scale — from a five-person team to a multi-department operation running across several markets.
Why approval workflows matter more than most teams realise
The case for structured approval workflows is usually framed around control — stopping unauthorised spend before it happens. That's real, but it's not the most important reason to get this right.
The more immediate problem approval workflows solve is speed and clarity. Without a defined process, reimbursements get delayed because no one is sure whose job it is to approve them. Disputes are hard to resolve because there's no record of who approved what and when. The finance team spends a disproportionate amount of time chasing approvers, following up on submissions that have gone quiet, and reconstructing decision trails after the fact.
A good workflow eliminates all of that — not by adding bureaucracy, but by making the right thing the easiest thing. The employee knows exactly where to submit. The approver gets a clear notification with everything they need to make a decision. Finance gets a clean record without having to ask anyone for it.
Start with the simplest workflow that works
The most common mistake when implementing expense approval workflows is over-engineering them from the start. Teams add layers of approval, complex routing rules, and multiple sign-offs before they've established whether a simpler structure would meet their needs.
For most small and growing teams, a single-level workflow is enough:
An employee submits an expense with a receipt, amount, reason, and relevant project or department.
Their direct manager receives a notification and approves or rejects it.
Finance receives the approved expense and processes the reimbursement.
The employee receives confirmation that their reimbursement is on the way.
That's it. This structure covers the vast majority of day-to-day expenses for most companies and keeps the process fast enough that employees actually use it rather than working around it.
The key details that make it work in practice: the employee gets a status update at each stage so they're never left wondering what happened to their submission, and the approver gets a notification with enough context — amount, reason, receipt — to make a decision without having to ask follow-up questions.
When to add a second approval tier
A second approval level makes sense when expense values cross a threshold that warrants additional scrutiny. The logic is simple: routine expenses move quickly through a single approver, while high-value expenses get an extra layer of review before they're processed.
A common structure looks like this:
Below the threshold — direct manager approval only. Fast, minimal friction, covers the majority of submissions.
Above the threshold — direct manager approval followed by a finance lead or department head. Higher scrutiny for expenses that have a more material impact on budgets.
Setting the threshold correctly is important. Too low, and you create unnecessary friction for routine expenses — your finance lead ends up approving a 2,000 NGN taxi receipt, which is a poor use of their time and an annoyance for the employee waiting on reimbursement. Too high, and the second tier provides no practical benefit because almost nothing reaches it.
A useful starting point is to set the threshold at the level where you'd genuinely want a second pair of eyes — typically somewhere between one and three times the average expense submission value for your team. Review it after three months and adjust based on what's actually flowing through each tier.
Department-based routing for growing organisations
As companies grow and org structures become more complex, routing approvals purely along reporting lines starts to create gaps. An employee in the marketing team who reports to a country manager for HR purposes probably shouldn't be routing their marketing spend to that country manager for approval — the country manager has no visibility into the marketing budget and no context to evaluate whether the expense makes sense.
Department-based routing solves this by sending expenses to the person best positioned to evaluate them, regardless of reporting line:
Marketing expenses route to the marketing lead.
Engineering expenses route to the engineering manager.
Travel expenses above a threshold route to the finance lead.
Client entertainment expenses route to the relevant account or project owner.
This keeps domain-specific spending visible to the people who understand the budgets and can make informed approval decisions. It also reduces the load on managers who would otherwise be approving expenses outside their area of responsibility.
The practical requirement for department-based routing is that your expense tool supports it — not all do. You need to be able to define routing rules by expense category or department tag, not just by employee reporting line.
Handling multi-entity and cross-market approvals
For pan-African companies operating across multiple markets, approval workflows carry an additional layer of complexity. An employee in your Ghanaian entity submitting expenses that will be recharged to the Nigerian entity needs a different approval path than a routine local expense. A field team member in a market without a local finance function needs a clear escalation path to a regional approver.
A few principles that help:
Define the approval hierarchy per entity, not just per company. Each legal entity should have its own defined approval chain so it's always clear who has authority to approve spend in that jurisdiction.
Set currency-specific thresholds. As covered in any multi-currency expense policy, approval limits should be defined in the currency of submission — not in a base currency that employees have to mentally convert before deciding whether approval is needed.
Build in a regional escalation path. For markets where the local approver is unavailable or the expense crosses a threshold that requires regional sign-off, there should be a defined escalation route that employees and approvers both know about in advance.
The three things every workflow needs
Regardless of how simple or complex your approval structure is, three things are non-negotiable for any workflow that's going to hold up over time.
Everyone knows their role. Every person in the workflow — submitter, approver, finance processor — needs to know exactly what's expected of them, when they'll be notified, and what happens if they don't act. Workflows that assume people will figure this out tend to collapse into informal email chains, which is usually where teams started before they tried to implement a process.
Status is visible at all times. An employee who submitted an expense four days ago and has heard nothing should be able to check its status without asking anyone. An approver should be able to see everything awaiting their action in one place. Finance should be able to see the full pipeline of approved expenses ready for processing. Visibility eliminates the chasing that consumes so much finance team capacity in informal systems.
There's a clear escalation path for unresponsive approvers. Approvers go on leave. Approvers miss notifications. Approvers are sometimes simply slow. If there's no defined escalation path, an employee's reimbursement sits in limbo indefinitely and the only resolution is an informal nudge — which defeats the purpose of having a structured workflow. Define what happens after 48 or 72 hours of inaction: automatic escalation to the next level, a reminder notification, or a flag to finance to follow up.
Choosing a tool that supports your workflow design
A well-designed workflow is only as good as the tool that enforces it. The things to look for when evaluating expense management software for approval workflow support:
Configurable approval tiers — can you define single and multi-level approvals, or is the structure fixed?
Department and category-based routing — can approvals route based on expense type or department, not just reporting line?
Per-currency thresholds — can you define approval limits in NGN, KES, GHS separately, or only in a base currency?
Automated escalation — does the system escalate automatically when an approver doesn't act within a defined window?
Status visibility for all parties — can employees, approvers, and finance all see the status of any expense in real time?
Audit trail — does the system record who approved what and when, in a format that's usable for reporting and audit purposes?
Farthingly was built with these requirements in mind — specifically for African companies managing expenses across multiple markets, currencies, and org structures. The approval workflow configuration reflects how teams on the continent actually operate, not how a US startup org chart assumes they do.