From paper forms to paperless approval workflows

Accounts payable and spend approvals ran on paper. Invoices, purchase orders, capital expenditure requests, and new-vendor setups were printed, signed by hand, walked between offices, and filed in folders. A form's status was whatever someone remembered, and evidence of approval lived in a filing cabinet.

Paper approvals are slow, easy to lose, and hard to evidence. For a controller, the real cost is control: who approved this, when, against which budget, and with which supporting documents — questions an auditor asks and a paper process struggles to answer quickly.

• Started from the official paper forms and the approval policy — not from the software — so each digital form captured exactly what the paper version required, including GL coding and capital project numbers.
• Mapped each approval route by document type: department leader, then Finance, then the CFO and CEO where the policy requires it; Controller and Accountant review for new vendors.
• Kept the control points where they belong: Finance assigns the purchase order number at its approval step, and a request can only be edited before the first approval — after that it is locked.
• Required people to re-authenticate to change a submitted request, and recorded every change as a before-and-after entry.
• Built on experience from an earlier paperless-workflow transition led at a prior employer.

• A paperless accounts payable process that replaced printed invoice routing across departments.
• Digital capital expenditure, purchase order, and new-vendor request forms with attachments such as quotes, W-9s, and invoices.
• Emailed approve and reject links for each stage, so approvers act from their inbox without logging in to another system.
• An automatically generated PDF of each form at every stage, and a vendor-ready purchase order once fully approved.
• A dashboard showing where every request sits, with a timeline of who approved it and when.
• Step-by-step fill-out guides for each form, so requesters get it right the first time.

• No more hand-carried paper: requests move to the next approver the moment the previous one acts.
• Complete, searchable approval evidence — approver, timestamp, attachments, and change history — for every request.
• Policy enforced by the workflow itself rather than by memory: required fields, approval order, and edit locks.
• Finance can see every open request and its stage without chasing anyone.

• Process mapping
• Approval-policy design
• Segregation of duties
• Audit trail design
• Document generation
• Email-based approvals
• Web application