What I automate / Approvals and internal requests
Approvals that live in a mail thread
A purchase request, a leave request, an expense claim, an exception to a policy. Somebody emails somebody, who forwards it to somebody else, who is on leave. Nothing is wrong with any individual step; the process simply has no memory and no visibility.
The cost is rarely the approver's time. It is the waiting — work that does not start, purchases that are made late, and the follow-up messages sent by people who cannot see where their request has reached.
This is one of the least technically interesting automations and one of the most appreciated, because everybody in the company feels the difference within a week.
You probably know this is you if
- Approvals happen in email and nobody can reconstruct who approved what
- A request stalls because one person is unavailable and there is no rule for it
- People send follow-up messages asking where their request has reached
- The same request is re-typed from scratch each time
- Month end involves chasing people for claims and submissions
The jobs in this area
Approvals living in a mail thread
A short form, a clear route, and a record of who approved what and when.
Requests stuck because someone is on leave
Rules for escalation and delegation applied automatically, rather than depending on a reply.
Nobody knowing where a request has reached
Status visible to the person who raised it, so the follow-up message never gets sent.
The same purchase reasoning re-typed each time
Recurring requests pre-filled from the last approved one, with only the changes needing thought.
Month-end scramble for expense claims
Reminders on a schedule, submissions validated on arrival, and a summary ready for whoever signs.
How a build like this goes
- 1
Start with one request type — usually the highest volume, not the most complex — and get it genuinely working before adding others.
- 2
Agree the escalation and delegation rules explicitly. Most processes have never had them written down, which is precisely why they stall.
- 3
Make status visible to the person who raised it. This one detail removes most of the follow-up messages and most of the frustration.
- 4
Keep the form short. A long form gets worked around, and a process people work around is worse than the email thread it replaced.
A worked example
Purchase requests for a 120-person company
- Before
- Email threads, an average of four days to approval, and no record of who approved what.
- After
- A short form, routed by amount, escalating after 48 hours, with status visible to the requester. Approval time drops to about a day.
The approvers save perhaps an hour a week each. The real saving is three days of waiting removed from every purchase, which shows up as work starting sooner rather than as hours on a timesheet — genuinely harder to put a number on, and usually the reason people ask for it in the first place.
Those are illustrative figures, not a quote and not a promise. Your own numbers are the only ones that matter — the calculator does the same arithmetic on them.
What this normally costs
A job in this area is usually a connected module: ₹60,000 to ₹1,80,000, two to four weeks. The exact number comes from the audit, in writing, before anything is built.
The audit itself is ₹9,999 and comes off the first build in full. If it turns out this is not worth automating for you, that is what the report will say.
Questions about this kind of work
Do people need another system to log into?
Preferably not. This usually works best inside the tools people already open — email, a chat tool, a shared sheet. A new system to log into is where these projects go to die.
What about approvals that genuinely need a conversation?
The automation handles routing, reminders and the record. It should not try to replace the conversation, and a process that forces one into a form makes things worse.
Can it enforce policy limits?
Yes — routing by amount, category or department is straightforward. Whether to make a limit a hard block or a flagged exception is a decision worth taking deliberately.
Tell me about your version of this
Tell me the job you are tired of
One call, half an hour. You will get a straight answer about whether it is worth automating — including 'no' if that is the answer.