Approval routing that doesn't get stuck in someone's inbox

Most approval bottlenecks aren't a people problem — they're a routing problem, where a request sits in one inbox with no visibility, no escalation, and no fallback.

Why "just email them" breaks down past a certain size

Email-based approvals work fine at five people. Past about 20, they break down predictably: the approver is out of office with no delegate, the request gets buried under 40 other unread messages, or nobody besides the requester knows the approval is even pending. We've measured this directly for clients — average approval cycle time for email-routed requests in mid-size companies typically runs 3-5 business days, with a long tail where some requests take two weeks because they simply got lost.

What a real routing engine looks like

We build approval routing as a state machine, not a notification system. Each request has a defined status (submitted, pending approval, approved, rejected, escalated), a defined approver based on request type and amount (a $500 expense routes differently than a $50,000 contract), and — critically — a time-based escalation rule: if no action within 48 hours, the request automatically escalates to a backup approver or the requester's manager, with a notification, not a silent wait. This typically runs on a workflow engine like Zapier or Make for simpler cases, or a dedicated tool like a custom-built approval layer on top of your existing systems for complex, multi-step approval chains.

The delegation problem nobody plans for

The single most common cause of stuck approvals we find in audits: an approver goes on vacation or leaves the company, and nobody updates the routing rules. A well-built system has delegation built in as a first-class feature — approvers set an active delegate for date ranges, and the system respects it automatically, rather than requiring someone to remember to forward every email manually.

A concrete before/after

For a professional services client with roughly 200 monthly expense and PO approvals routed through email, we rebuilt the flow with automated routing, 48-hour escalation, and delegate management. Average approval time dropped from 4.2 days to 9 hours. More importantly, the number of requests that took longer than a week dropped from around 15% of volume to under 2% — the automated escalation caught almost all the cases that previously fell through the cracks entirely.

Where teams get stuck

Teams often try to route every possible approval type through one universal flow. This produces a system too generic to be useful — a $200 expense and a $200,000 vendor contract shouldn't have the same approval chain. We build tiered routing rules based on request type and value from the start, even if it means more upfront configuration.

How Ndakum approaches it

Approval routing is a common thread in our Document Automation work — we map your actual approval chains, including the exceptions, before building the automated version.