Approval gates: how to stop work moving before sign-off

Approval by email works until the business grows past the point where one person can see everything. This is what replaces it.

Why informal approval fails at scale

Informal approval works while one person can see everything. Past roughly twenty people, it quietly breaks: a purchase goes ahead on a verbal yes, an offer is sent before a salary band is confirmed, a job is booked without a competent engineer available. Nobody behaved badly. The system simply allowed it.

A simple model that holds

• Name the decision, not the document: spend, offer, variation, release.

• Give each decision one accountable owner and one deputy.

• Set a threshold where the decision escalates rather than waits.

• Record the decision where the work lives, not in a mailbox.

The last point is the one most businesses miss. If the approval is not attached to the job, the person or the contract, it is not evidence. It is a memory.

What good looks like six months in

Approvals stop being a bottleneck and start being a filter. Owners get asked fewer questions, because the system only brings them the decisions that genuinely need a judgement. Audits become a read-only exercise.

sme+ applies the same permission model and audit trail across all six products, so a gate set once holds everywhere. Talk to sales about how it would map onto your structure.