Glossary
Approval workflow
An approval workflow is the set of steps a timesheet, expense, time-off request, or invoice has to clear before it is finalized: who reviews it, in what order, and what happens if they reject it. For an agency or consultancy, it is the checkpoint between someone recording work and that work turning into a bill, a budget change, or paid leave.
What triggers an approval workflow
The most common triggers are timesheets, where a manager confirms the hours before they are billed; expenses, where someone checks a cost is legitimate and billable before reimbursement; time off, where a manager confirms coverage before leave is booked; and change orders, where a lead or finance signs off on a scope or budget change before it takes effect.
Each trigger has its own approver and its own consequence for skipping the step. Skip timesheet approval and you bill hours no one has checked. Skip change-order approval and you deliver extra scope with no agreed fee attached to it.
Manual vs automated approval workflows
A manual workflow runs over email or a shared spreadsheet: someone submits, someone else replies to approve, and the record of who signed off lives in a message thread. It holds up for a small team but breaks down once there are more than a handful of approvers or a backlog of items waiting on a reply.
An automated workflow routes each item to the right approver based on rules like project, cost, or role, and tracks its status, pending, approved, or rejected, in one place instead of an inbox. Nobody has to remember what they are still waiting on.
What happens without one
Without an approval step, timesheets get billed unreviewed, expenses that should not have been billable slip into project cost, and scope changes go ahead before anyone confirms the client agreed to pay for them. None of this shows up immediately. It shows up weeks later as a disputed invoice, an over-serviced project, or a margin that does not match what the plan said it should be.
Example
A 40-person business runs weekly timesheet approval: everyone submits by Friday afternoon, their project lead reviews and approves by Monday morning, and only approved hours go into that week's invoicing run. When a lead is travelling and misses the Monday deadline, the hours sit as pending instead of going out unreviewed. The invoice is a day or two late, not wrong.
