Quote to cash
The worst approval is the one waiting on somebody who left.
It sits pending. Nobody is notified, because the person it resolved to does not exist. The rep assumes it is moving, the customer assumes the rep is slow, and it surfaces a week later when somebody asks.
So the chain is resolved and shown to you before anything is submitted.
Before submitting
A dry run of the whole chain, with the answer on screen.
Two ceilings you set: a discount percentage and a total value. Under both, the rep sends. Over either, it needs approval.
At that point the entire routing chain is resolved as a rehearsal and shown — each step, who it lands on, and how long they have. And if nobody resolves, the quote stays in draft with an actionable message, rather than entering a pending state against nobody.
- Rin Takahashiyour manager48 hours
- Anyone who can approve quotes3 people hold this72 hours
- The discount is reconstructed, not trusted —
Recomputed from the lines rather than read from a field, so the gate cannot be stepped around by zeroing a percentage.
- A submission needs a sentence —
Enforced at a handful of characters — enough to stop the drive-by submission that leaves a reviewer with no context.
- Either ceiling can be switched off —
Set it to nothing and that gate stops applying, for a team that only wants one of the two.
The chain
Nine ways to say who approves, and a definition that is frozen once it starts.
An approver can be a named person, a role, the submitter's manager, the level above that, a department head, the signatory of a legal entity, or anybody holding a particular permission. A step can need any one of them, all of them, or a number out of a group. Each step can carry its own condition and its own clock, with escalation when it runs out, and somebody can delegate while they are away.
The definition is frozen when an approval starts. Editing the workflow afterwards reshapes future approvals and cannot reach into one already in flight — which is the difference between changing a policy and rewriting history.
With nothing configured, a sensible chain is built anyway: the submitter's manager, then anybody who can approve.
- The drafter cannot approve their own work —
And cannot reject their own submission either. There is a setting to allow it, off by default, whose own description names the exception it exists for — the one- or two-person firm.
- A rejection routes back to draft with the reason attached —
Shown as a banner on the record rather than an email somebody has to find.
- The same machinery approves contracts —
And credit notes, refunds and write-offs. One approval system rather than a different one per document.
›Can the ceiling differ by product or by customer?
No. The two ceilings are per workspace. Conditions can vary what happens within the chain, but the trigger itself is one discount figure and one value.
›Does the value ceiling account for currency?
Compare like with like when you set it — the figure is taken at face value, so a workspace selling in several currencies should set the ceiling against the one it mostly quotes in.
›What happens when an approval times out?
It escalates, to the configured depth. A subject type with no workflow configured has no escalation to perform, so it times out at the first breach — worth configuring a workflow for anything you care about.