#17 Requesting employee (initiator), department manager (fills in EQ details, reviews inventory-check results, confirms or justifies the request), and finance (control/gatekeeper function)

Expenditure Approval (EQ/EP) Workflow

Submitted by Abdullah Ahmad Ashkanani

Workflow diagram for the expenditure approval (EQ/EP) process, from employee submission through inventory check to auto-approval or finance review. — Workflow diagram as submitted

Pain point

Procurement requests today are ad hoc — someone emails around asking for an item, approvals happen inconsistently (sometimes verbal, sometimes buried in an inbox), nobody checks whether the department already owns something similar, and the request either sits waiting for a signature or gets rubber-stamped without real review. This wastes time and stalls approvals.

Proposed solution

Digitize the expenditure approval process so requests route themselves by risk instead of relying on manual email chains. Every request starts as a structured form (price, vendor, item), is automatically checked against existing inventory to catch duplicate purchases, and then splits by amount: under $10,000 is auto-approved instantly, $10,000 and above goes to finance for manual review with a documented approve/reject decision. Rejections return with comments and trigger a resubmission rather than dying in an inbox.

Claude surface

Cowork, Design

Open question

The exact hierarchy of approvals for the EQ needs to be confirmed.