300 Approvals a Month, Zero Spreadsheets: Automating Workflows with NetSuite

Every growing business hits a version of the same wall. The procedures that had been functioning at 50 individuals and 100 transactions each month began to shatter at 200 individuals and 300 approvals. A brief conversation and a signature now become a series of emails, a spreadsheet that someone was last organising three days ago and a manager trying to find a colleague halfway around the world to sign in a document that could take a few minutes.

To one mid-sized manufacturing and supply chain business, this was no hypothetical. It was Tuesday morning, every week. Purchase orders were hanging around awaiting approvals that were emailed, but not acted upon. Vendor payments had to be slowed due to the finance department's inability to determine whether procurement had signed off. The operations managers were keeping parallel tracking sheets to be aware of the current position of any given request, since the data was stored in NetSuite, their ERP, but provided no organised workflow in which they could move the data through the business.

It was not only time that was a cost. It was visibility, control and type of process discipline which scaling businesses cannot afford to do without. To fully automate the workflow of approvals, the organisation hired Codinix Technologies to swap the spreadsheets and email chains and manual chasing with a fully automated approval workflow with native NetSuite.

Client Overview

The client is a supply chain and manufacturing company that conducts business in several production locations and supplier networks. They have a large number of purchase orders, vendor onboarding, capex requests, and inter-departmental procurement, all of which would need multi-level approvals before financial commitment or any action towards the operation itself could occur.

Key characteristics of the organisation:

• Handling more than 300 approval requests monthly in procurement, finance, and operations
• Supplier base of 150 or more active suppliers in the raw materials, logistics, and contract manufacturing
• Value-based multi-tier approval hierarchies with department heads and finance controllers, and executive sign-off requirements based on value thresholds
• NetSuite is already implemented as the central ERP for financials, inventory, and procurement
• A lean finance and operations team managing approval routing manually alongside their primary responsibilities

Business Challenges

As transaction volumes grew, the gaps in the approval process became impossible to manage manually:

• There was a lack of a centralised approval tracking such that at any point in time, one individual or system could not have a total picture of where the pending requests were in various departments.

• Routing by email meant that approvals were lost, delayed or processed in the wrong order, and there was no audit trail and no way to escalate in case of a deadline slippage.

• Spreadsheet dependency meant that operations and finance employees had to manually keep parallel tracking sheets up to date, devoting 10 to 12 hours of team time per week and causing all too many errors in version control.

• The routing was also not predictable as high-value purchase orders were occasionally accepted by an employee whose authority level was not adequate because of absence or ineffective communication.

• Vendor payment delays averaging 8 to 12 days beyond agreed terms, caused by approval bottlenecks upstream in procurement, were damaging supplier relationships and in some cases triggering late payment penalties.

• No visibility for requestors, staff submitting purchase requests had no way to track status without emailing the approver directly, creating constant back-and-forth that interrupted both parties.

Why Existing Approaches Were Not Working

The organisation had recognised the problem and attempted to address it before bringing in Codinix:

• A shared approval tracker in Google Sheets had been introduced, but required manual updates from multiple teams and was reliably out of date within 24 hours of each update cycle.

• Email approval chains had been partially standardised with templates, but there was no enforcement mechanism and no way to prevent approvers from bypassing steps or acting out of sequence.

• NetSuite's out-of-the-box approval routing had been partially configured but not tailored to the organisation's specific hierarchy, threshold logic, or multi-department workflow requirements.

The core issue was that approval management had been treated as a communication problem rather than a systems problem. The solution was not better templates or more disciplined email habits, it was structured workflow automation with enforcement, visibility, and audit capability built in.

Solution: Codinix's NetSuite Workflow Automation

Codinix Technologies designed and implemented a fully automated, rules-based approval workflow system built natively within NetSuite, covering purchase orders, capex requests, vendor onboarding, and inter-department procurement across all facilities.

Core components of the solution:

• Automation and routing of approval whereby every request was directed to the appropriate approver or approval chain, depending on the type of request, the value threshold, the department and the facility without human intervention.

• Through dynamic threshold logic, you could be sure that requests on levels that were above set bands were automatically suited to the corresponding level of authority, and there was no chance of the sign being under-authorised.

• With in-system approval operations that enable the approvers to view, approve, decline, or seek clarification of the requests at NetSuite itself, eliminating a single more email as a medium of workflow.

• Automated escalation and reminders that sent notices to approvers at set intervals and escalated to the next level of authority in case no action was registered within the agreed response periods.

• Requestor visibility dashboard that provides a real-time status view on a request to each staff member who has made a request, a view on the approver they are currently waiting on and a timeframe for when the request is expected to be closed.

• Complete audit of all activities, time-stamped, and approval comments with each request giving the finance and compliance departments an entire history to make a report and resolve the vendor disputes.

• Vendor payment interface connecting approved purchase orders directly to the purchase payment queue of NetSuite, eliminating the handover between procurement approval and finance action.

Key Outcomes

Following deployment, the results were measurable across process efficiency, financial control, and supplier relationship management:

Additional outcomes:

• $23,000 saved annually in late payment penalties and vendor dispute resolution costs, directly attributed to faster approval-to-payment cycles.

• Supplier satisfaction measurably improved, with on-time payment rate rising from 54% to 91% in the two quarters following deployment.

• Finance close accelerated by 3 days at month-end, as approved PO data flowed directly into NetSuite financials without manual reconciliation.

• Zero spreadsheet dependency within 6 weeks of go-live, with all approval tracking consolidated inside NetSuite.

• Executive visibility improved significantly, with leadership able to view outstanding approvals, bottlenecks by department, and average turnaround times from a single NetSuite dashboard.

Key Takeaways

This interaction with Codinix Technologies demonstrated some of the principles that can be applied to any organisation dealing with high-volume approvals in terms of departments:

• The issue of approval management is a systems issue and not a communication issue. Formatting email templates and updating spreadsheets more often will not solve the problem of broken workflow; it will just clean up the breakage.

• The difference between a policy and a process is enforcement. Authority rules, which are threshold-based, will be useless when they can be circumvented in the system. NetSuite was automated to ensure compliance was structural as opposed to behavioural.

• Visibility minimises chasing, and chasing is costly. Each requestor that sends an email to an approver requesting an update on the status is disrupting the work of two individuals. That loop is completely removed by a real-time dashboard.

• The direct financial effect on the downstream is the upstream approval speed. Faster approvals in this case equated to faster vendor payment, which equated to fewer penalties, better supplier terms and a finance department that could close the month without waiting on procurement data.

To this organisation, the automated approval workflow developed by Codinix Technologies did not merely do away with spreadsheets; it provided the business with the process infrastructure that could allow it to grow its operations without necessarily growing the administrative overhead that it had previously incurred each time it increased its transactions.