Overview
Some documents should not go through unchallenged. A purchase order above a threshold, a discount outside policy, a salary change, a payment that breaks a budget — each needs a signature before it takes effect, and each needs a record of who gave it.
Nama ERP’s approvals system puts that control into the document itself. You define when approval is required, who must give it, and what happens if nobody does — and the system holds the transaction until the answer arrives.
Features
Approval definitions on any entity
An approval definition is the master rule: which entity it watches, the conditions that trigger it, the steps it runs, and how approvers are told. It can apply to any entity type in the system — invoices, purchase orders, employee records, journal entries — not a fixed list of “approvable” documents.
Triggers are precise. Require approval on insert, on update, on delete, or specifically when a transaction exceeds its budget. Narrow it further with an Apply When query, so only the records that genuinely need review are stopped — approval on orders above 10,000, and nothing else.
Steps that match a real hierarchy
Steps run in sequence or in parallel, each with its own responsible employees or roles and its own decision options — approve, reject, or return for correction.
- Escalation. If a step stalls, hand it to the approver’s supervisor, their direct supervisor, or a specific employee they choose.
- Delegation. Designate a deputy or backup approver for a whole workflow, so leave and travel do not stop the business.
- Require execution. Add a final step that returns to the person who raised the request, so approved transactions are confirmed by their originator before they take effect.
An approval case you can see
When a document meets the criteria, the system opens an approval case — a live record showing the current status (in progress, approved, rejected, returned), every decision taken so far with its comments, and who is expected to act next. Nothing is waiting in somebody’s inbox invisibly.
Approve from your email
Approvers are notified by email, SMS and in-app message, using templates you control. Templates carry the document’s own data and an approval link, so a manager can review a summary and act on it from their mail client without opening the ERP — which, in practice, is the difference between an approval cycle that runs in hours and one that runs in days.
A complete audit trail
Every decision, every comment, every escalation is retained against the document. When an auditor asks who authorised a transaction and on what basis, the answer is attached to the transaction itself.
Where it fits
Approvals work alongside Entity Flows: a flow enforces rules a machine can judge, an approval cycle routes the judgements that need a person. Between them, most of the control a finance function asks for is configuration rather than custom development.
Read the full approvals documentation, including sample email templates.
