What happens today?
If you mapped how spending decisions are approved in most mid-market companies, you’d see something like this:
An email chain
A spreadsheet with names typed into cells
Comments in Teams
A final approval buried somewhere in Outlook
No one designed it this way, it just evolved.
Why This Breaks as Companies Grow
This approach works when:
Volumes are low
Decisions are obvious
The same people are always involved
But as spend increases, it creates real problems:
No clear status of what’s approved
No version control
No easy audit trail
No single view of decisions made this year
Finance teams spend time chasing context instead of evaluating value.
The Shift That Actually Helps: Treat Decisions as Workflows
The mistake man…
What happens today?
If you mapped how spending decisions are approved in most mid-market companies, you’d see something like this:
An email chain
A spreadsheet with names typed into cells
Comments in Teams
A final approval buried somewhere in Outlook
No one designed it this way, it just evolved.
Why This Breaks as Companies Grow
This approach works when:
Volumes are low
Decisions are obvious
The same people are always involved
But as spend increases, it creates real problems:
No clear status of what’s approved
No version control
No easy audit trail
No single view of decisions made this year
Finance teams spend time chasing context instead of evaluating value.
The Shift That Actually Helps: Treat Decisions as Workflows
The mistake many companies make is trying to fix this with better templates or dusty PDF guides.
The real improvement comes from treating spend decisions as a workflow, not a document and digitising it so people are prompted to follow process as they’re doing the work, rather than look up page 7, table 4 of your old PDF.
A scalable process answers:
What needs justification?
Who reviews what?
Where does it live?
How do we see status and history?
A Practical Model That Works
What works well in practice:
Ops teams draft structured justifications for spend
Finance and commercial teams evaluate, challenge, and refine
Approvals move through a single workflow
Everything is saved automatically
No more email archaeology.
Why This Is Easier With the Right Tool
Riff supports this by sitting between ops and finance:
Ops gets guided prompts instead of blank pages
Finance gets consistent, comparable inputs
Approval logic replaces email chains
The process becomes clearer and adoption follows because it actually saves time.