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.