Document Approval Workflows: Stop Chasing Signatures and Start Closing Faster

There’s a contract on someone’s desk right now. It was sent for approval four days ago. It needs two signatures before it can go to the client. The first person signed it on Tuesday. The second person hasn’t seen it because they were in meetings all week and the email got buried. Nobody knows it’s stuck. The client is waiting. The deal is cooling.

This scenario — a document sitting in approval limbo — plays out in every business that relies on manual approval processes. Contracts, proposals, purchase authorisations, policy documents, change orders, leave requests. Anything that needs someone to review and sign off before it can move forward.

The problem isn’t that people are slow or careless. It’s that email is a terrible system for tracking approvals. Documents get lost in inboxes. There’s no visibility into where something is in the process. There’s no automatic escalation when something stalls. And the person waiting for the approval has no way to know what’s happening without sending an awkward “just checking in” message.

The Real Cost of Slow Approvals

Slow approvals aren’t just annoying — they directly impact revenue and operations.

Contracts: Every day a contract sits unsigned is a day revenue isn’t starting. For a $50,000 project, a one-week approval delay costs you a week of cash flow and potentially pushes the project start date, cascading into scheduling issues for your team.

Proposals: The faster a proposal reaches a prospect after a meeting, the more likely it is to be accepted. Research from InsideSales.com found that the odds of closing drop by 10x if you wait more than 5 minutes to follow up after initial interest. A proposal that takes 3 days to get internal approval before being sent is dead on arrival in competitive markets.

Internal approvals: Leave requests, expense claims, equipment purchases, policy changes — when these pile up waiting for sign-off, they create bottlenecks that frustrate your team and slow down operations. Employees stop requesting things because “it takes forever to get approved,” which means legitimate business needs go unmet.

What an Automated Approval Workflow Looks Like

A properly automated approval workflow handles four things: routing, notification, tracking, and escalation. Get these four right and your approval times drop dramatically.

Routing: Getting Documents to the Right Person

Manual routing means someone decides who needs to approve a document and emails it to them. This breaks when the rules aren’t clear (who approves contracts over $100K?), when the normal approver is on leave, or when multiple people need to sign off in a specific order.

Automated routing works from predefined rules:

• Value-based routing: Contracts under $10K go to the team lead. $10K-$50K goes to the operations manager. Over $50K requires director approval.
• Sequential routing: The legal review happens first, then finance review, then final sign-off. Each step triggers automatically when the previous one is complete.
• Parallel routing: Three department heads all need to approve the new policy. The document goes to all three simultaneously, and moves forward when all have signed.
• Delegation routing: When the primary approver is on leave, documents automatically route to their designated delegate.

Notification: Making Sure Approvers Know It’s Waiting

The single biggest improvement in approval speed comes from proper notifications. Instead of an email that looks like every other email, the approver gets:

• A clear notification (email, Slack, SMS, or push notification — whatever they actually check)
• A summary of what needs approval and why
• A direct link to review and approve in one click
• Context about urgency and any deadline

Tracking: Visibility Into Where Everything Stands

This is what email-based approvals can never provide. A proper approval system gives you a dashboard showing:

• Every document currently in the approval pipeline
• Where each document is in the workflow (who has it, how long they’ve had it)
• Average approval times by document type, department, and individual approver
• Bottlenecks — who consistently holds up the process

Escalation: When Approvals Stall

This is the feature that saves the most time and eliminates the most frustration. Without escalation rules, a stalled approval requires someone to notice it’s stalled, figure out who has it, and send a follow-up. With escalation rules:

• Reminder at 24 hours: Gentle notification to the approver that the document is waiting
• Second reminder at 48 hours: More prominent notification, flagged as overdue
• Escalation at 72 hours: Document automatically routes to the approver’s manager or a designated backup
• Alert at 96 hours: The original requester and a senior stakeholder are notified that the approval is significantly overdue

You define the intervals. You define who gets escalated to. The system handles the uncomfortable task of chasing people — so your team doesn’t have to.

Tools for Different Levels of Complexity

Simple Approvals: E-Signature Platforms

If your main bottleneck is getting external signatures on contracts and proposals, an e-signature tool solves 80% of the problem.

DocuSign, Adobe Sign, and Annature (Australian-made, great for local compliance) all let you send documents for signature with automatic reminders and tracking. For most small businesses, this is the starting point — and it might be all you need.

The improvement is immediate. Instead of printing a contract, posting or emailing a PDF, waiting for it to come back signed, and chasing when it doesn’t — you send a digital document that the recipient can sign on their phone in 60 seconds. Average signing time drops from days to hours.

Medium Complexity: Workflow Automation Tools

When you need internal approval routing before documents go external — or when approvals involve more than just signatures — you need workflow automation.

Tools like Kissflow, Process Street, or Jotform Approvals let you build multi-step approval workflows with conditional routing, parallel approvals, and escalation rules. They’re designed for exactly this problem and require minimal technical setup.

If you’re already using Monday.com, Asana, or ClickUp, these platforms have approval workflow features built in. They’re not as sophisticated as dedicated tools, but they work well enough for straightforward internal approvals.

High Complexity: Custom Approval Systems

Off-the-shelf tools hit their limits when:

• Approvals depend on data from other systems. The approval routing needs to check the project budget in your accounting system, the client’s credit status in your CRM, and the resource availability in your scheduling tool — all before deciding who should approve.
• You have compliance requirements. Regulated industries need tamper-proof audit trails, version control, and specific retention policies. Generic tools often can’t meet these requirements.
• The approval is part of a larger process. When document approval is just one step in a complex workflow — say, a change order that needs to update the project scope, adjust the budget, notify the client, and update the schedule — you need the approval system integrated into the broader process.

Reducing Approval Time From Days to Hours

Based on the approval workflows we’ve built, here are the changes that make the biggest difference to turnaround time:

Mobile-friendly review. If approvers can only review documents on their desktop, approvals only happen when they’re at their desk. A mobile-friendly approval interface means the operations manager can approve a $15,000 purchase order from the airport lounge instead of making the team wait until Monday.

One-click approve. Every extra click or step in the approval process adds delay. If the approver needs to download a file, open it, read it, then reply to an email with “approved” — that’s too many steps. A single button that says “Approve” or “Request Changes” with an optional comment field is all you need for routine approvals.

Context in the notification. Don’t make the approver hunt for information. The notification should include a summary: what the document is, the key numbers, why it needs approval, and any deadline. If they can make the decision from the notification alone, they will — and they’ll do it immediately instead of putting it on their to-do list.

Batch processing for routine items. For high-volume, low-value approvals (expense claims, leave requests, standard purchase orders), let approvers review a list and approve multiple items at once. This is faster than individual notifications for each item.

Start Here

Today: Check your email. How many documents are you currently waiting on someone else to approve, or that someone is waiting on you to approve? That number is your current bottleneck inventory. If it’s more than three, you have a workflow problem.

This week: Map your top three approval workflows. For each one, document: who initiates, who approves (and in what order), what happens when someone is unavailable, and how long it currently takes on average. This gives you a clear picture of where automation will have the most impact.

This month: Implement e-signatures for external documents if you haven’t already. This is the fastest win — you can be live in a day, and the improvement in turnaround time is immediate.

Every document sitting in an inbox waiting for approval is a decision that hasn’t been made, a project that hasn’t started, or a customer who’s waiting for an answer. The approval itself might take 30 seconds. It’s the routing, reminding, chasing, and tracking that consumes hours. Automate the logistics around the decision, and the decisions start happening at the speed your business actually needs.