Budget Approvals That Actually Work
Most finance teams waste hours chasing approvals through email chains and spreadsheets. We teach you how to build workflows that people actually follow — because nobody has time for twelve-step processes that collapse the first week.
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The Problem with Budget Approval Systems
Companies spend thousands on financial software, then watch everything fall apart because nobody trained the actual humans using it. Marketing submits requests in the wrong format. Department heads approve things they shouldn't. Finance scrambles to track everything in three different systems.
We've seen organizations with beautiful approval workflows that exist entirely on paper — while the real work happens through panicked Slack messages and hallway conversations.
What Actually Needs to Happen
You need people who understand both the technical side and the human side. Someone has to know how to configure approval hierarchies, sure. But they also need to explain it to a department manager who just wants their team event funded without reading a manual.
Our courses start September 2025 — giving you time to assess your current systems and figure out what's genuinely broken versus what just needs better communication.
Learning from Real Budget Disasters
One of our instructors worked at a manufacturing firm where the approval system had seventeen steps. Seventeen. Every purchase request took minimum three weeks, so managers started splitting orders to stay under approval thresholds.
Finance discovered this six months later during an audit. The problem wasn't the managers trying to work around the system — it was that the system treated a box of printer paper the same as a vehicle purchase.
We teach you how to spot these issues before they become compliance nightmares. Sometimes the answer is better technology. Often it's just better thinking about who needs to approve what, and why.
How Organizations Break Their Own Systems
These patterns show up everywhere, from small businesses to corporations
Too Many Approvers
Every manager wants visibility, so they get added to approval chains. Soon you have eight people signing off on office supplies, and half of them just rubber-stamp everything because they're too busy.
No Clear Thresholds
When does a purchase need director approval versus VP approval? If nobody can answer that quickly, people will either over-escalate everything or hope nobody notices they skipped steps.
Training That Doesn't Stick
Someone sends a policy document and calls it training. Three months later, finance is still answering the same questions because nobody retained information from a PDF they skimmed once.
What Our Programs Cover
We focus on practical skills you can use immediately — not theoretical frameworks that look good in presentations but collapse in practice.
Workflow Design
How to map approval paths that match how your organization actually works. We cover threshold setting, escalation rules, and how to handle exceptions without creating chaos.
System Implementation
Technical setup of approval systems, integration with existing financial software, and troubleshooting common problems. You'll work with actual scenarios from companies we've consulted with.
What Past Participants Say
I expected a lot of theory about financial controls. Instead, we spent most of the time working through actual workflow problems with our own systems. By the third week, we had redesigned our entire approval process — and it actually reduced approval time by half.
The most useful part was learning how to train people who aren't finance-minded. Our marketing and operations teams finally understand why certain approvals exist, which means they stop trying to work around the system.
