Run your own approval process, not somebody else's

The platform's rules on approvals and budgets always hold. Everything above them is yours to shape.

Workflow — capital equipment sourcing
Drafting
Legal review
Award
4h in stage
Awardneeds procurement.approveunavailable to you
Rejectnote requiredavailable
Drafting → Legal review · J. Okafor · Tue 09:14“spec signed off”
Only declared routes appear, and only the ones this person may take are offered. Every move is written to an append-only log with its actor and its reason.

Your process, on top of rules that do not bend

Order approvals, budget commitments and the guards on a purchase order are platform rules, and they stay that way — otherwise a buyer could configure its way past its own signature policy. A workflow sits above them, tracking where a requirement or an order has got to inside your company. The two never contend for the same decision.

A move nobody declared is not a move

Stages are connected by routes, and only a declared route can be taken. Skipping legal review because the stage after it looked available is refused by the database, not by a screen — so it holds however the move arrives.

Gates that follow your own permission edits

A route can require a permission, resolved through the same check as everything else. If your company has taken order approval away from members, the award step refuses them too, without anyone remembering to update the workflow.

The record answers “who signed this off”

Every move writes an append-only event with its actor, its note and its timestamp. A status column tells you where something is; this tells you how it got there, which is the question an auditor actually asks.

Lateness you can see before it costs you

Give a stage an SLA and work sitting there too long is marked late. Nothing blocks — the point is to surface the requirement stuck in review for nine days while there is still time to move it.