Why "Faster Approvals" Is the Wrong Goal
Every approval tool promises the same thing: faster approvals. Reduce approval time by 60%. One-click from your phone. Get POs approved in minutes, not days.
I used to think that was the right goal. After years of NetSuite consulting, speed seemed obvious — nobody likes waiting three days for a signature. But I’ve come to think we’re solving the wrong problem.
The question I started asking Controllers: What’s more expensive — a PO that takes 3 days to get approved, or one that gets approved in 3 minutes but routes to the wrong person?
The slow one is annoying. The misrouted one shows up in your audit as a control deficiency. I’ve seen companies spend tens of thousands remediating findings that could’ve been avoided if the system had prioritized correctness over speed. The 3-day delay? Usually fixed with a Slack message.
The productivity trap. When you optimize for speed, you make choices that work against audit readiness: fewer approval steps, simpler rules, bulk approve, mobile tap-through. All of that makes approvals faster. It also makes it harder to show that the right person actually reviewed the right transaction. I’ve never heard an auditor say “your approvals are too slow.” They ask: Can you prove the right person approved this? Can you prove what they saw? Can you produce that evidence quickly?
A better frame. Evaluate approval workflows on defensibility, not speed. A defensible process is one where you can hand an auditor any transaction and show who approved it, when, why they were the right person, and what the transaction looked like at that moment. Speed follows from good design; it shouldn’t be the main goal.
When finance leaders say “our approvals take too long,” the real pain is often elsewhere: “We spend weeks pulling evidence for auditors.” “I’m not sure our routing matches our policy.” “When someone’s on vacation, everything breaks.” Those are control problems. They’re a lot more expensive to get wrong than a slow approval — and when someone breaks the approval chain to keep things moving, speed-first thinking is usually why.
Patrick is the founder of Greenlight Approvals, a NetSuite-native approval workflow platform built for audit readiness.