A discount sits in a thread. A PO sits in an inbox. A refund sits in a DM that got buried. Nobody decided this was the process. It became the process because Slack was open and email already had the PDF.

Chasing approvals feels like communication. It is actually a queue with no owner, no timer, and no record of who said yes. The work is not the judgment. The work is finding the person, restating the context, and asking again.

Where the hours go

When we map an approval chase, it usually looks like this:

  • Requester writes a Slack message with a screenshot or a link, missing the one field the approver always asks for
  • Approver is in a meeting. The ping ages. Requester sends "just bumping this"
  • A second person gets copied "in case you see them first"
  • Yes arrives as a thumbs-up or a one-line reply. Nothing writes that yes into the system that actually needs it
  • Requester copies the decision into the CRM, the invoice tool, or a spreadsheet, if they remember

Illustrative math we use with operators: eight of those chases a day, five minutes each of writing, waiting, and re-asking, is 40 minutes. That is more than three hours a week, north of 150 hours a year, before you count the delay on the thing that was waiting. Quotes sit. Vendors wait. Refunds linger. The clock on the customer does not pause because someone was in a call.

The expensive part is not typing. It is stalled work plus a decision that never became a record.

What "approved" should mean

A real approval path is boring on purpose:

  • A clear trigger: form submitted, deal over a threshold, refund requested, PO created
  • The right person, with the fields they need, in one place. Not a scavenger hunt across Slack
  • A deadline and a nudge that does not depend on the requester's memory
  • Yes or no writes back to the system of record. The CRM, the invoice, the order. No second copy-paste
  • Exceptions only: amount over a cap, missing docs, a conflict. Those ping a human. The rest should not

That is not a new culture of "being better about Slack." It is a workflow. Same pattern as invoice follow-up and quote chase. Different trigger. Same idea: stop using a person as the reminder system.

When a human should still decide

Do not automate taste. If the next step depends on reading the client, a legal exception, or a one-off deal structure, keep the person. Automate the routing, the packet, the nudge, and the write-back. Leave the judgment in the seat that is paid for judgment.

The test is the same one we use before a hire: if you can write "when X, send to Y, unless Z," you are looking at a sequence. If you cannot, you are looking at a conversation. Most shops mix both in the same Slack channel and then wonder why nothing moves.

What changes when the chase is gone

Approvers see a short queue with context, not a firehose of "quick question." Requesters stop performing follow-up as a personality trait. Finance and ops stop reconstructing who said yes from a thread from last Thursday.

You also get an audit trail without a new policy binder. The record is the path. That matters when something goes wrong, and when volume doubles and the old "just ping me" model falls over.

If your week is full of "waiting on them" and "I thought you saw it," look at approvals before you look at another hire or another chat tool. The bottleneck is usually a missing trigger, not a missing person.

Stop staffing a reminder job. Put the yes where the work already lives.