Submit. Verify. Approve. Introducing Approval Workflow for sales and purchase transactions

Growth is great for your business, but more hands can also mean more opportunities for mistakes. Aaron is a business owner who just received a phone call from his customer over an error in a sales order. On verifying the sales order, Aaron noticed that the employee who raised the order entered the quantity incorrectly. This could have been eliminated if there was an approval workflow in place for Aaron to review the sales order before it was sent out.

If you’ve been in Aaron’s situation before and are looking for a solution, we come bearing good news. The Zoho Finance apps (Zoho Books, Zoho Invoice, and Zoho Inventory) are rolling out a new feature called Transactions Approval, which lets you verify and approve transactions created by you and your employees.

Why should I enable the approval feature?
Say you are a business owner with multiple employees who all create transactions for you. If one employee makes a mistake in a transaction, it’s easy for the other employees to overlook the error because they’re focusing on their own transactions. Without a verification step, the mistake will be reflected in your account balances and you’ll be struggling to find the discrepancy. Sending out wrong data could also reflect badly on you and affect your relationship with your customers.

With the approval feature enabled, your employees create transactions and then submit them for approval. The user who has approval access can verify the transactions and edit them if needed before approval, avoiding any errors that might occur.

What are the benefits?

Increased accuracy
As purchases and sales transactions are sent for approval, you can eliminate the risk of processing incorrect transactions and sending them out to your customers. The admin user (or another user with approval access) has to validate each recorded sale or purchase transaction for it to reflect in your accounts, thus also giving you a better opportunity to rule out any fraudulent practices.

Increased efficiency
When a transaction is sent for approval, the user with approval access gets an in-app notification, letting them know about the waiting transaction. No need for phone calls or emails, which makes things easier for everyone. All the approver needs to do is sign in, verify, and approve. 

Increased productivity
When you’re not wasting time on clarifications, you can perform more transactions. Create a transaction, submit it for approval, and move on.

How do I get started?
Sign in to your preferred Zoho Finance app and navigate to Settings, then Preferences. Enable the option to approve transactions, and you are good to go. Your organization’s admin will have access to approve transactions, and you can always add more users with approval access to make things easier.

Head over to our help documentation(Zoho Books,Zoho Invoice,Zoho Inventory) if you’d like to know more about the approval feature. Or, if you need help, you can always talk to our support team — help is just an email or phone call away.