Stop Chasing Decisions by Email: Approval Platform

Submit requests, effortlessly get approval from the right people and have every decision on record — built on the Microsoft 365 you already own.

Every company runs dozens of approval processes — spend, compliance, access, corporate governance — and almost none of it leaves a trace. The request goes by email to whoever the requester assumes is responsible, carrying maybe half the information the decision actually needs, and the answer comes back as a "yes, fine" that sits in one person's inbox and that nobody can find again six months later. There's a policy document which everyone signed once and nobody's opened since — and it's not what anyone actually works from. On paper, you have a control but in practice, you have a habit.

Our Approval Platform turns that habit into a process. A short form asks exactly what the decision needs; a rules engine built around your own decision logic works out which approvals are required, in what order, and who else needs to be told. A pending request is visible, and so is whose turn it is to act. The right people are asked directly, with the full context in front of them, and provide a decision and any comments in a couple of clicks. Every step is logged as it happens, so who approved what — and on what basis — is a matter of record logged inside Microsoft 365, the platform you already run.

Which Approvals?

Whilst not every decision belongs in a workflow, organisations and teams often face more repetitive processes that lend themselves to automation than they might initially think of. Our Approval Platform can be tailored to capture your specific approval processes, such as:

  • Spend and purchase requests below the PO threshold — amount, category and cost centre decide who signs
  • Pricing and discount exceptions — the size of the deviation decides the level
  • Insurance extensions, with approval levels depending on the premium
  • External communication and marketing releases — a named customer or a competitive claim pulls in legal
  • Headcount requests, offers above band and contractor engagements
  • Exceptions to your own rules — travel outside policy, or a time-limited waiver from an internal standard with the risk accepted by a named person

We are happy to discuss your use cases and exact requirements with you.

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Key Benefits

  • Requests arrive fully completed — dynamic forms allow for the capture of all relevant information
  • Uses your decision logic, not a template — which approvals, in what order, with which exceptions
  • The correct approvers are determined automatically — not the requester's best guess
  • Roles, not names — teams can maintain their own approvers without an IT ticket
  • Nothing stalls thanks to reminders, deputies, escalation, visible status
  • A complete record for every approval — who decided what, when and why — audit-ready
  • Meaningful analytics providing approval volumes, durations, and where requests stall
  • Optional features such as enforced signing policies and integration with your eSignature provider
See the Approval Platform in Action
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We'd be glad to show you in a short call how the Approval Platform handles one of your own approval processes. Just leave your details and we'll get back to you shortly.

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Our Approval Platform in Detail

Built on Microsoft 365 — More Than Just Power Automate

Our solutions make use of the entire Microsoft 365 platform to create a great user experience. Requests are submitted via a form in Power Apps or Microsoft Forms, routing and notification run in Power Automate, the record lives in your own SharePoint, and approvals reach people in Teams and Outlook, where they already work. No new software product, no procurement, no cloud risk assessment: your data stays in your tenant, and access follows your existing identity management. Leading to a fast and reliable implementation provided by NodeMasters. If you already run BRYTER or HighQ, the same solution can be built there instead — the rules and the intake are platform-independent.

The real difference from 'out of the box' approval actions is tailoring the solution to your approval process and logic. The rules are configuration, not code — thresholds and categories decide which approvals a request triggers, whether several approvers are asked in parallel or in sequence, and what happens on a rejection or a request for more information. Approvers are tied to roles rather than individuals: your approval matrix draws on the directory you already maintain, so a department can change who holds a role, or add a deputy, without anyone touching the workflow itself. Where a role is held by several people, the request can go to all of them, or to one picked at random from the pool — useful when what you need is a second pair of eyes, not one particular person. And because an approval decision usually has two different audiences, we keep them separate: approvers see each other's full internal reasoning, while the requester gets the decision with a justification that's written to be passed on.

All of it is documented as it happens — every request, every stage, every decision and reason, in a single list rather than seven mailboxes. That's what makes a decision easy to reconstruct a year later, and what finally makes the process measurable: which approvals take longest, which thresholds generate the most work, and where raising a limit would remove the request altogether.

What It Costs, and How a Project Runs

We offer two pricing options, depending on how many approval processes you have.

The Approval Platform — from £19,500 / €22,000 / $25,000, based on automating six typical approval processes

We'll look at your approval processes together, with particular attention to the most complex ones, and build a model around those that we can reuse for every process that follows. Implementation then starts where automation delivers the most value. Intake and overview run in Power Apps, which gives you a genuinely usable interface with validation of what's entered, and one place where everyone sees their own requests and the approvals waiting on them.

Platform and first process are finished within two weeks; we then test together with real cases. Further approval processes are priced from £2,600 / €3,000 / $3,400, depending on complexity.

Quick Start — one process, on Microsoft Forms, from £3,500 / €4,000 / $4,500

A single approval process of no more than moderate complexity, built on Forms, Power Automate and SharePoint. We can do this without the platform, and you have a working, documented process in a week. Moving to the platform later — because further approval processes come along, say — is always possible; the effort for that is then additional.

  • Both are one-off project fees — not a licence per employee or per year
  • We give you a firm figure once we've seen your setup and your decision logic
  • Running costs are essentially your existing Microsoft licensing. Depending on your agreement, individual features may need an upgrade — for example Power Apps or Power Automate Premium, where certain connectors or Dataverse are involved. As a rule, that's a low three-figure sum per year, and we'll confirm it with you before the project starts
  • Rules, thresholds and role assignments are designed for your own team to maintain; we only bill for structural changes, by effort
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