Every growing business eventually adds approval chains — for expenses, leave requests, purchase orders, discounts. The intent is always reasonable: someone senior should sign off before money moves or a commitment is made. The failure mode is just as consistent: the approval chain becomes the slowest part of the process, and people start routing around it.
The three ways approval chains fail
They're too deep for the stakes involved. A ₹500 expense claim requiring three levels of sign-off isn't control, it's friction with no proportional benefit. If the approval effort doesn't scale with what's actually at risk, people learn to avoid triggering it — splitting claims, under-reporting, or simply not bothering to file small expenses at all, which is worse than the process you were trying to improve.
The approver is a bottleneck, not a decision-maker. If one person is the sole approver for an entire department and they're traveling, in meetings, or simply slow to check requests, everything behind them stalls — not because the approval itself is hard, but because the routing has no fallback.
Nobody can see where a request actually is. When "approval" means an email forwarded to someone, there's no visibility into whether it's sitting unread, actively being considered, or was already approved and the requester just hasn't been told. This ambiguity is often more frustrating to people than the wait itself.
A better design pattern
Scale approval depth to the actual risk, not to organizational hierarchy. A useful heuristic: approval levels should map to thresholds, not to the requester's seniority. A ₹2,000 expense from a junior employee and a ₹2,000 expense from a director should trigger the same approval depth — because the risk being controlled for is the amount, not the person.
approvalLevels(amount) {
if (amount < 5000) return ['manager'];
if (amount < 50000) return ['manager', 'finance'];
return ['manager', 'finance', 'director'];
}Build in a delegation or escalation path. An approver who hasn't acted within a defined window (24-48 hours is usually reasonable) should automatically escalate to a backup — not leave the requester stuck indefinitely. This one change eliminates most of the "waiting on one person" bottleneck pattern.
Make status visible without requiring a follow-up message. The requester and the approver should both be able to see exactly where a request sits — pending, approved, rejected with a reason — without either side having to ask. This is less about the workflow logic and more about not treating approval status as something that lives only in someone's inbox.
Where this connects to org structure
Approval routing that's hardcoded to specific individuals breaks the moment your org chart changes — someone gets promoted, a new hire joins, a manager leaves. Routing that's tied to roles within the reporting hierarchy instead of named individuals survives organizational change without anyone having to go update a list of approvers somewhere. This is one of the more underrated design decisions in HR and workforce tooling: approval logic should be a function of the current org chart, computed live, not a static configuration that drifts out of sync with reality.
A worked example
Illustrative scenario, not real customer data.
Aravali Engineering Solutions (fictional, ~150 employees) redesigned its expense-approval chain around threshold-based depth and 48-hour auto-escalation. A before/after comparison of the same claim types:
| Claim type | Old flow (fixed 3-level chain for everyone) | Redesigned flow (threshold + escalation) |
|---|---|---|
| ₹800 travel reimbursement | 3 approvers, avg. 6.5 days to close | 1 approver (manager), avg. 0.8 days |
| ₹35,000 vendor advance | 3 approvers, avg. 6.5 days to close | 2 approvers (manager + finance), avg. 2.1 days |
| ₹4 lakh capex request | 3 approvers, avg. 6.5 days to close | 3 approvers, avg. 3.4 days (auto-escalated once) |
| Requests abandoned or split to dodge approval | ~14% of small claims | Effectively zero — smallest tier had almost no friction to avoid |
The capex request — genuinely the one that warranted three sign-offs — didn't get faster because the process got looser. It got faster because it stopped competing for the same approvers' attention as ₹800 reimbursements, and because a stalled approver no longer meant an indefinite wait.
The test for whether your approval chain is working
If people are finding workarounds — splitting requests to stay under a threshold, going around an approver informally, or simply not filing something because the process isn't worth it — that's not a compliance problem to solve with stricter enforcement. It's a signal the approval design itself has more friction than the risk it's controlling for actually warrants.