Approvals & budget control
Rules by amount, category, and department. Parallel review instead of sequential chains. A standing delegate for every approver. And the budget position visible before anyone says yes.
Today
With Procura Flow
Capabilities
Thresholds, categories, departments, and delegation are configured in the interface in minutes. No support ticket, no professional services engagement.
When finance and procurement review the same request for different reasons, they review it at the same time. Sequential steps are reserved for genuine dependencies.
Requests validate against the cost centre's remaining budget, including existing commitments, and flag before approval rather than at month end.
Standing delegates, out-of-office handover, and automatic escalation after a defined number of days keep the queue moving through holiday season.
Budget remaining, whether a contract already covers it, quotes obtained, and business justification — presented where the approval happens.
Who approved what, when, on what information, with comments preserved. Exportable in one action when an auditor asks.
How it runs
01
The request captures amount, category, cost centre, and justification.
02
Rules select the smallest set of approvers who can genuinely assess it.
03
Approvers act with budget and contract context in view; comments are logged.
04
Approved spend commits against budget and converts to a purchase order.
0.9 days
Median request-to-approval time, Northbay Logistics, last full month
80%
Share of Northbay transactions cleared by the lowest approval band
31% → 8%
Northbay maverick spend rate over three quarters
All three come from one deployment with an unusually clean cost centre structure. A company with overlapping budget ownership will spend its first month arguing about who approves what, and the software cannot settle that argument.
Limitations
Cases we handle badly or not at all. Better you read them here than find them in week three of an implementation.
Enforcement depends on a cost centre budget loaded and maintained somewhere. If budgets are re-forecast in a spreadsheet each month and never re-imported, the remaining-budget figure on a request will be confidently wrong.
We control spend before commitment. Card transactions arrive after the fact, so they belong in your expense tool — we will show them as uncontrolled spend, not manage them.
Routing logic handles amount, category, department, supplier status, and combinations of those. Anything that depends on knowing the project politics still needs a human in the chain, and we would rather you put one there.
Further reading
Approval workflows fail when they are designed for the rarest purchase. Here is how to set thresholds, routing, and delegation that hold up day to day.
Aaron Grainger · 8 min read
Maverick spend is purchasing that bypasses your agreed process or contracts. Here is how to quantify it honestly and reduce it without adding bureaucracy.
Aaron Grainger · 8 min read
Most procurement policies are too long to follow. Here is a one-page structure covering thresholds, competitive requirements, and exceptions.
Aaron Grainger · 8 min read
A 30-minute walkthrough using your categories, approval thresholds, and supplier list.