The Office Manager Who Stopped Chasing Signatures

Finance & Automation

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” — Benjamin Franklin

“Did you approve my expense?” “I think so.” “It still says pending.” “Can you resend it?”

For one BAASS Caribbean client’s office manager, that exchange happened in some form almost every week — made worse by a sales team that travels between islands and a managing director who is often out of signal range on a site visit. Not because anyone was careless. Email was never built to be an approval system, and expense approvals had quietly become her second job.

Building the Rules Into the Workflow

The policy already existed on paper: small expenses need one approval, larger ones need a department head and finance, certain categories need receipts attached. The gap was never the policy. It was making sure the policy actually happened, every time, without someone remembering to enforce it.

Once expense approvals were routed automatically — amount-based rules, required documentation, visible status at every stage — the office manager stopped being the person who tracked down signatures and became the person who reviewed exceptions.

The Week Nothing Went Missing

The real proof came during a month when three managers were traveling between locations for a regional sales push. In the old process, that would have meant a backlog of unapproved expenses sitting untouched for two weeks. Instead, the workflow routed each request to a designated backup approver automatically. Nothing sat waiting for someone who happened to be off the island.

Control, Not Less of It

It is a common worry that automating approvals means loosening control. In practice, the opposite happened here: approval thresholds were enforced consistently instead of depending on memory, and every approval carried a timestamp and an audit trail that a spreadsheet never could.

Your managers should be deciding whether an expense is appropriate — not searching their inbox for the original request.

At BAASS Business Solutions, we help organizations design connected approval workflows that improve speed, documentation, and financial control. Talk to BAASS today.

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