To Approve or Not to Approve: Say Hello to a Future Built for You by You
New Year’s may be around the corner, but let’s step back in time for a bit, to a little over a decade ago. To a time when, if you wanted to listen to personal music you had to use CDs or cassette tapes. If you wanted music custom to your taste, across genres and artists, well good luck- you would have to spend copious amounts of time creating mixtapes and burning CDs.
Today, if we want to listen to music, we just press a button on a platform like Spotify or Pandora and voila! A personalized playlist of our unique tastes begins to play.
The world of technology is on a fast-track towards greater and greater intelligent customizations, and we have kept up with the trends with a slew of scriptable frameworks that help us tailor our products to fit our customers’ unique needs. The latest of which: time-triggered approvals and scriptable timesheet, time off, and expense approvals.
With a scriptable workflow, teams can now automate the approval process to their unique needs. Timesheets can be sent to a project manager, and after their approval, be sent to a project accountant if it surpasses a budget threshold, then get routed to the supervisor, and so on. If someone in the workflow doesn’t approve the timesheets on time, they can automatically get bumped up to the next person in the chain. This way no one needs to keep track of who has and hasn’t approved the timesheets. It also eliminates delays, helping the payroll coordinator stay on top of payroll and compliance.
These capabilities can be applied across the board over several other industries as well. Companies can set up specific approval workflows for different time off types. For example: A vacation request goes to a supervisor, but a sick leave request in excess of 3 days goes to HR.
Organizations can also use this new flow to gain valuable insights. Let’s say a project supervisor at a professional services company wants to understand overtime on a project, they can set up the system so that timesheets with overtime get escalated to them and those without it get approved automatically. That way, the supervisor can get real-time visibility where it matters without getting inundated with minuscule items.
Using these frameworks for time off and expenses can also reduce liability and compliance risk, while ensuring billing is done on time.
Just as we would not limit ourselves to the cassette tapes our uncle bought us for out birthday when we were kids, we shouldn’t have to settle for a one-size-fits all software provider. Every minute spent working around a system that doesn’t accommodate unique needs is a minute wasted. So, let’s stop sweating the little things, and automate and customize where we can to save time and increase productivity.
