Why Purchase Approvals Take Days (and 7 Ways to Fix It)

Quick answer: Purchase approvals take days because a request spends most of its life waiting: for the right approver to notice it, for missing details, or for someone to come back from leave. The reading and deciding usually takes minutes. To fix purchase approval delays, name one approver per step, refuse incomplete requests, set a response target, plan backups for absences, keep approvals in one place and measure how long each step really waits.

Why it takes days when the supplier replied in hours

A supplier answers quickly because quoting is their job and your order is their income. Inside your business, approving the purchase is nobody's main job. It competes with meetings, month-end work and travel, so it sits in a queue.

The cost is real. A quote with a short validity period can expire while it waits, so you go back to the supplier and the price has moved. Stock runs out. Staff who are tired of waiting start buying around the process, paying from their own pocket or splitting purchases into smaller amounts (we cover that in how to stop purchase splitting). And a reviewer later finds approvals given after the goods had already arrived.

Delay at the approval desk is a recognised problem in Nigerian public procurement too. In March 2026 the News Agency of Nigeria reported the Director-General of the Bureau of Public Procurement telling a training for public officials in Abuja: "If a file stays on your table for 48 hours, you are already violating guidelines." That remark was about government procurement, not private businesses, but the point carries over: a file that nobody is working on is a cost.

Waiting time vs work time

The useful question is not "how long did approval take?" but "how much of that time was anyone working on it?" Lean practitioners separate the two. The Lean Enterprise Institute defines processing time as the time an order is actually being processed, and production lead time as the whole time it takes to move through a process from start to finish. It notes that processing time is typically a small fraction of lead time. Purchase approvals follow the same pattern.

Take the request in the screenshot below (demo data, illustrative). A ₦185,000 toner request has two approval steps. The manager's step took 22 hours 50 minutes; the second step has been pending for 2 days 23 hours. If each approver needs ten minutes to read the request and decide, about 20 minutes of work has taken close to four days. Cutting the 20 minutes will not help. Cutting the waiting will.

The five usual causes

1. Nobody is sure who approves

The request goes to whoever the requester thinks is right, who forwards it or assumes someone else will act. Each hand-off can add a day.

2. The request is incomplete

The approver opens it, finds no quote, no budget line or no reason, asks a question in a message, and moves on. The request then waits twice: once for the answer, once for the approver to come back to it.

3. Nobody follows up

Without a reminder, a pending request depends on the approver's memory, and requesters may not know it is stuck or may feel awkward chasing a senior colleague.

4. The approver is away and there is no backup

Leave, travel or illness stops everything behind that one person. US federal internal control standards (the GAO's Green Book) expect management to define contingency plans for assigning responsibilities when a key role is vacated without advance notice. A purchase approver is a small version of that key role.

5. Approvals are buried in chat and email

A WhatsApp approval scrolls out of sight within hours, and an email approval sits in one person's inbox. Neither shows anyone else what is pending, and neither leaves a record a reviewer can easily inspect.

Seven fixes, and who does each one

1. Name one approver for each step. Write down who approves which requests, by department and by type, and who comes next. Who: the owner or finance manager. For limits by amount and a one-page matrix, see who can approve what.
2. Refuse incomplete requests at the door. A request without a reason, a cost estimate, a department and any quote it relies on goes back before it reaches an approver. Who: requesters, with procurement checking. The fields are listed in how to organise purchase requests.
3. Set a response target for each step. For example, one working day for a routine request. The target is your policy, not a law; the value is that everyone knows when a request counts as late. Who: the owner or managing director, written into the purchasing policy.
4. Name a backup for every approver. Agree who signs when the approver is on leave or travelling, and update the approval route before the absence, not after a week of waiting. Who: department heads, confirmed by the owner.
5. Keep approvals in one place, reachable from a phone. One queue where every pending request is visible, which approvers can open away from their desk. Approvals given in chat do not count until they are recorded there. Who: the administrator who sets up the process, and every approver.
6. Follow up on a schedule, not on feelings. When a step passes its target, the requester sends one reminder. If it is still stuck, the requester's manager calls the approver. Who: requesters first, then their manager.
7. Ask for changes instead of parking the request. If something is missing, the approver sends it back with a specific question the same day, rather than leaving it pending or rejecting it outright. Who: approvers.

One caution for finance readers: speed must not cost control. Do not fix delays by letting requesters approve their own purchases. The Green Book describes segregation of duties, separating authority, custody and accounting, as a way to help prevent fraud, waste and abuse. A faster route through the right people is the goal, not fewer people.

How to measure before and after

You need a baseline to know whether the fixes worked; a month of records is enough for a small business.

1. Take every purchase request from the last month (or the last 20, if you have fewer).
2. For each one, note when it was submitted, when each approval step was completed and when the final decision came.
3. Work out the waiting time per step. Then ask approvers roughly how long they spend on a typical request; that is your work time.
4. Count how many requests were sent back for missing information.
5. Repeat after six weeks of running the fixes and compare.

Use the middle value (the median) rather than the average, so one request stuck for a month does not hide the improvement on the rest.

Diagnostic table: symptom, likely cause, fix

How RequisitionPro helps

All seven fixes can run on a policy and a spreadsheet. The platform helps by making waiting visible and follow-up routine.

Difficulty: approvers do not know a request is waiting for them. Approval workflows are set up per department, with each step assigned to a person or a role, so every request goes to a named approver. When a requisition reaches a step, the approvers for that step get a notification, and the requester can see the status on the requisition at any time.

Difficulty: you cannot see where the time goes. The approval trail on each requisition shows every step, how long a completed step took and how long the current step has been pending. That is the waiting-time measure above without a stopwatch.

Difficulty: chasing feels awkward. While a requisition is pending, the requester sees a Send Reminder card and can send a reminder to the approver. Reminders are limited in number, so they prompt without becoming noise; if a request is still stuck after that, fix 6 (a manager's phone call) applies.

Difficulty: requests stall over a missing detail. An approver can choose Request Amendment, which needs a reason typed into the comment box. The requisition goes back to the requester, who is notified, edits it and resubmits it for approval. Approvers can add an optional comment when they approve; rejecting needs a reason.

Difficulty: approvers are away from their desk. RequisitionPro is a web app that works in a phone browser and has been optimised for phones, so an approver can open a requisition and approve it while travelling. There is no separate mobile app to install.

One boundary to be clear about: the platform does not hand a request to a backup approver automatically or escalate it on a timer. Fix 4 stays a policy decision: agree the backup and update the approval route before the absence.

Related questions

How long should a purchase approval take? There is no universal standard. Set a target per step that fits the request type, write it into your policy and measure against it. If you have no data yet, pick a simple starting point, such as one working day per step for routine purchases, and adjust once you have a month of figures.

Should we approve on WhatsApp when it is urgent? Treat a chat message as a heads-up, not the approval. Record the decision in your approval system or register the same day, so the file shows who approved and when.

Does a faster process mean weaker control? Not if the same people still approve. Most of the time saved comes from cutting waiting, not from skipping checks.

Next step

Watch the "Approval Workflows" video (1:45) on the tutorials page to see how approval steps are set up and how a requisition moves through them.