When a management team tells us an expense approval takes six days, our first question is how they know. Usually the answer is that everybody agrees it feels that way. So we measure it, and the measurement is where the conversation changes.
Time the waiting, not the working
Take thirty recent requests and record four timestamps for each: raised, first approval, final approval, paid. Then split each gap into time spent doing something and time spent sitting on a desk. In every process we have measured, the doing takes minutes and the sitting takes days.
That matters because it tells you what to fix. If the approving itself were slow, you would need more approvers or a higher threshold. It is not. The request is simply invisible while it waits.
Count the hand-offs
Each hand-off is a chance for a request to stop. A memo that travels requester to supervisor to head of department to finance to managing director has four points at which it can rest untouched for a day. Ask which of them exercises real judgement. Often one stage is purely a countersignature added years ago after a specific incident, and nobody has revisited whether it still earns its place.
Find the return loop
Count how many requests come back for correction, and why. If a third are returned because the account details were missing, that is not an approval problem — it is a form problem, and it is fixed by making the field mandatory at submission rather than by adding another reviewer.
Then automate what remains
Once you have cut the stages that do not exercise judgement and fixed the fields that cause returns, automation has something worth doing: routing to the correct person automatically, showing the requester where their request is, reminding an approver after an agreed wait, and escalating when the wait becomes unreasonable.
That combination — fewer stages, better forms, automatic routing and reminders — is what takes six days to under one. Automation alone, applied to the unchanged process, gets you a faster version of the same six days.
The report you could not produce before
After the process runs in a system, you can finally answer questions that were unanswerable on paper: average time by stage, which approver is the bottleneck this month, how many requests are open, and what they are worth. That reporting is often more valuable to management than the speed itself.