Document approval workflow: why invoices and contracts wait for weeks and how to fix it

Take a hypothetical manufacturing company with 120 employees. An invoice for machine servicing lands in the accounts team’s shared mailbox. Two days later someone forwards it to the production manager who ordered the service – but he is on holiday. The accountant chases it after a week, and his deputy finally approves it twelve working days after it arrived.

Checking the invoice itself took a few minutes. The rest was waiting that nobody planned and nobody could see. The same pattern repeats with contracts, purchase orders and leave requests.

The causes are almost always similar, and they are rarely about individual people being lazy. Usually several of them are at work at once:

The cost of delays rarely shows up in reports, because it is spread across small amounts and scattered hours. You can still estimate it in three places: interest and compensation, lost discounts, and the time of people who chase signatures.

The first place is the law. When a company pays a supplier late, the supplier can claim statutory interest for late payment in commercial transactions: the NBP reference rate plus 10 percentage points. In the second half of 2026 this gives 13.75% a year, and the rate changes every six months along with the NBP rate. On top of that comes compensation for debt recovery costs: EUR 40, 70 or 100, depending on the invoice amount.

Say an invoice for PLN 20,000 is paid 10 days late. The interest comes to about PLN 75 (PLN 20,000 × 13.75% × 10/365). The compensation for this amount is EUR 70, or about PLN 300 at an assumed rate of PLN 4.25 to the euro. So with short delays the compensation can be several times higher than the interest itself.

The second place is lost discounts for paying quickly. Some suppliers, especially wholesalers and materials suppliers, offer an early-payment discount: for example 2% off if you pay within 10 days instead of the standard 30. When a PLN 50,000 invoice waits two weeks for sign-off, the discount period runs out and the company pays PLN 1,000 more than it needed to. Check whether your contracts with your largest suppliers include such terms.

The third place is working time. Calculate: number of documents per month × share of documents that need chasing × minutes per reminder × hourly labour cost. With 400 invoices, one in four needing a reminder and 10 minutes per case, you get about 17 hours a month. At PLN 80 an hour that is about PLN 1,330 a month, or PLN 16,000 a year.

Plug in your own figures and you get an amount that is easy to compare with the cost of making changes. Do not add “lost opportunities” to it without evidence. A cautious, verifiable figure will persuade the management board more effectively than an impressive one.

The cheapest and most effective change requires no system at all. It is an approval matrix: a single table that states, for each type of document, who approves it, up to what amount, by when, and who stands in when that person is away.

The management board should approve the matrix, and one person should be responsible for keeping it up to date – usually the CFO or COO. Without this, within six months the table will no longer match the company’s structure and people will go back to email. Below is an example for a mid-sized company – adjust the thresholds and deadlines to your scale.

The first row of the table hides an important rule. If a purchase was already approved at the purchase order stage, the invoice does not need a second business decision. It is enough to confirm that the goods arrived and the amount matches the order.

In many companies an invoice goes through four or five signatures, because after every past mistake someone added another one. Nobody removed them afterwards. Every extra signature means another queue and another person who might be on holiday.

Ask three questions about each level. Does this person make a different decision from the previous one? Have they ever rejected a document? Would anything bad happen if they saw it in a report rather than in their approval queue?

A sensible minimum is the four-eyes principle. One person confirms that the purchase was needed and delivered, and a second checks the document from a formal and financial point of view. Add further signatures only above amount thresholds, and send people who just want to know about spending a summary instead of a task.

Once the rules are written down, you need to make them work by themselves. Take an invoice that has been waiting with a manager for two working days. On the morning of day three he gets a reminder in Teams, and on day four the case goes to his deputy. The manager does not have to remember anything, and the accountant does not have to chase anyone.

A workflow like this has several elements that look much the same whatever the tool:

There is no single best tool. The choice depends on which documents you want the workflow to cover and where your people already work. We compare the four most common options in the table below, and describe Microsoft 365 in more detail here, because many companies already pay for it.

SharePoint stores a document together with its details, such as the amount, department and purchase order number. Based on these details, Power Automate sends an approval request to the right person, who responds in Outlook or Teams.

Power Automate lets you require approval from everyone named, from only the first person to respond, or from several people in sequence. In Teams, requests appear in the Approvals app (called Zatwierdzenia in the Polish interface). Decisions are recorded in the Microsoft Purview audit log, the record of events in Microsoft 365. The approvals feature does not need an extra licence in Microsoft 365 plans that include Power Automate.

There is one limitation worth knowing from the start. A single Power Automate flow run lasts at most 30 days, after which pending approvals expire. Deadlines and passing cases to deputies are therefore not an extra but a condition for making sure a document does not get stuck for good.

From 1 February 2026 every company in Poland receives invoices through KSeF, Poland’s National e-Invoicing System – the government platform through which invoices between businesses pass. Two months later, from 1 April, most sellers must also issue invoices in it. Until 31 December 2026, taxpayers whose invoiced sales do not exceed PLN 10,000 a month including VAT are exempt.

For the approval workflow this is good news. A domestic invoice from KSeF arrives as structured data: the seller’s tax identification number (NIP), amounts, dates and line items are already in separate fields, with no retyping from a PDF. The workflow can therefore start automatically once the invoice is downloaded from KSeF, not when someone spots it in a mailbox.

Reading data from scans (OCR, which converts an image of a document into text and numbers) is still useful for foreign invoices, receipts and documents that are not invoices. In Power Automate, one option is the prebuilt invoice model in AI Builder, which also supports Polish. From 1 November 2026, Power Automate Premium licences no longer include AI Builder credits, so the cost of reading documents has to be calculated separately.

KSeF does not solve the approval problem, though. The invoice reaches the company faster, but someone still has to confirm that the purchase was needed and delivered. Without written rules, it will simply reach the same queue sooner.

While you are at it, it is worth adding one check before payment to the workflow. For a transaction above PLN 15,000, paying into an account that is not on the Polish VAT white list (the public register of VAT taxpayers and their bank accounts) means losing the tax-deductible cost. It also exposes the company to joint liability for the supplier’s unpaid VAT. The account check can be built into the last approval step, just before the invoice is passed on for payment.

AI does not remove the approval queue, but it can shorten the time needed for the decision itself. Microsoft 365 Copilot can summarise a long contract before approval: it can point out the parties, amounts, deadlines and clauses that differ from the template. The approver still reads the document but knows what to look out for.

Copilot is a paid add-on. According to Microsoft’s price list, Microsoft 365 Copilot Business for companies with up to 300 users costs USD 21 per user per month with annual payment. You do not have to buy it for everyone – licences for the people who regularly approve long documents are enough.

The limits are clear. AI can make mistakes, so the decision and the responsibility stay with a person. Limit automatic approval without human involvement to simple rules, for example an invoice that matches the purchase order to the penny – and such a rule can be written without AI.

It is best to start with one type of document that generates a lot of work and has a clear cost of delay. In most companies that means purchase invoices, less often supplier contracts.

Do not skip measuring at the start – without it, after the rollout you will only have impressions, and the management board will ask for numbers. The plan might look like this:

Sometimes automation does not pay off. If a company receives a few dozen invoices a month and two people sitting in the same room approve them, written rules and a shared folder are enough. The same applies when the accounting system already has a good approval module – it is better to configure it than to build a second one alongside it.

When automation does make sense, the most common mistake is moving today’s mess into a new tool. If an invoice needed five signatures by email, it will need five in Power Automate too – it will just reach the same queues faster. Other typical mistakes: