Manual and siloed approval workflows slow everything down. Kanbina automates routing, enforces your authority schedule, over all types of approvals and delivers fast, compliant sign-off—without the email chase. Explore the contrast below. 

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The Daily Ordeal of Financial Approvals

Every morning, the finance team checks the status of invoices, journals, and exceptions waiting for approval. Dozens of transactions are sitting in limbo—some for hours, others for days. The process is supposed to be simple: assign approvers, validate spend, move forward. But it never works that cleanly. One document is waiting on a manager who’s on holiday. Another is stuck because the cost centre owner changed last quarter. A journal needs dual sign-off, but only one approver is listed. And no one’s quite sure if that director still has the right level of approval authority. So the chasing begins.

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The Bottlenecks Build

They start by checking emails—then Teams messages, Slack threads, and shared folders. Approval requests are buried under inbox clutter. Someone approved in email, but didn’t click the system. Another stakeholder replied “OK” but didn’t add a signature.

The ERP shows a pending status, but offers no reason why. Is it routing logic? Budget limits? Delegation rules? The logic lives in a spreadsheet—somewhere. To unblock one payment, the AP team has to ask the FP&A team who has signing rights. For a journal entry, a junior analyst needs to escalate three layers to find out who can approve the reclass. Meanwhile, the month-end close is stuck.

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The Pressure Rises

By midday, frustration grows. A critical supplier invoice is overdue because of a missed approval. Treasury can’t release payment until the chain is complete. Journals remain unposted, leaving the GL incomplete. The CFO wants to know what’s outstanding and why. There’s no dashboard. No real-time view. Just spreadsheets, email threads, and guesswork. The team keeps working late—not because of the volume, but because of the delays.

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And Tomorrow, It Starts All Over Again

The same approvals will still be pending. New ones will arrive. The same follow-ups. The same blockers. The same fatigue.

The business doesn’t lack process—it lacks visibility and control.​

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The Four Points of Pure Pain 

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1. Missing Logic, Messy Routing

Authority schedules are unclear or out of date. Approval rules live in PDFs or spreadsheets. Approvers are assigned manually, often incorrectly.

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.2. Stalled Transactions, Lost Momentum

Invoices, credits, POs, reconciliations, journals, and exceptions wait for days. Chasing approvals becomes a daily task—taking time from real work and delaying critical decisions.

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3. Inconsistent Audit Trail

Some approvals are in the system. Others are in email. Some have no record at all. Auditors ask for evidence, and finance has to scramble to collect it.

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4. No Visibility, No Accountability

No one can see what’s holding things up. There’s no live dashboard, no workflow map, and no automated escalation. Bottlenecks grow silently.

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The Human Cost 

This isn’t just about slow approvals—it’s about blocked work and burned-out people. Finance teams spend hours following up, re-routing, clarifying roles, and enforcing rules manually. The friction kills momentum. The repetition drains morale. And the lack of visibility creates risk—operational, financial, and reputational. It’s a governance issue wrapped in admin—and it’s costing more than time.

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The Automated Kanbina Approval Process 

The Kanbina Approval service automates and governs the approval of invoices, POs, credits, journals, and finance transactions by applying your organisation’s authority schedule directly into the process—intelligently and in real time.  Kanbina Approvals can be deployed for all approval in the financial process to give a single system to bring to a close in the month end process. 
 

The system reads the transaction context (cost centre, department, amount, entity, GL code) and automatically determines who needs to approve what—based on pre-set thresholds, hierarchies, and multi-signoff logic. It then routes the transaction to the correct approver instantly, without the need for email chains, manual lookups, or admin follow-ups.  Approvers receive clear, context-rich prompts within the platform. They can review the transaction, see supporting documents, view their sign off history, and approve or reject in a single click. Escalations and delegation logic are built in—so nothing sits idle or gets stuck with unavailable users. Manager have a dashboard where they can see the queues and intervene in the workflows to expidite transaction responsibility. Users no longer need to interpret approval rules, reference old spreadsheets, or manually assign reviewers. The platform manages the routing, timing, escalation, and audit trail—seamlessly and securely.

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The service handles a wide range of real-world approval workflows, including:

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• Invoice approvals by budget owner, cost centre, and PO match status tailored to requirements

• PO approval, credit approval, reconciliation, journal approvals, and more to cover the month end close

• Dual-level or split-entity approvals across shared business units

• Delegated authority handling for absent or transitioned approvers

• Role-based restrictions by function, region, or legal entity

• Real-time audit trail capture for every approval step

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The result is fast, accurate, and compliant approval flow—with every decision recorded, timestamped, and fully traceable and management can expedite transactions by interjecting into the workflow.  All activity is tracked and visualised in embedded Power BI dashboards, allowing finance teams and leadership to monitor approval bottlenecks, outstanding items, turnaround times, and compliance performance over time. The process is smart, automatic, and audit-ready from day one. Approvers get simplicity. Finance gets control. And the organisation gets faster, safer outcomes—every time.

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