Why paper and email no longer work
A printed form travels from office to office, an approval email goes unanswered, and nobody knows where the request stands. At month-end, finance discovers commitments it never saw.
A managed workflow fixes three things at once: every request has a visible status, every decision is dated and named, and the month's spending reads by department without consolidating spreadsheets.
Define roles and steps
Start with roles rather than the tool. Awa has five: the Manager creates orders for their department, the CFO approves them, the CEO gives the final sign-off, the Accountant matches the invoice and books it, and the Admin manages users, suppliers, account codes and departments.
An order then moves through seven statuses: draft, awaiting CFO, awaiting CEO, approved, rejected, sent and booked. When the CFO creates an order, the CFO step is skipped and the order goes straight to the CEO.
A department and an account code on every line.
The supplier's quote attached to the order, not in a separate email.
One approval queue per decision-maker, handled one by one or in batches.
Separate duties and explain rejections
The basic internal-control rule: you do not approve your own spend. Awa enforces it at every step, including for the CEO, whose orders must be approved by another decision-maker, and for the Accountant, who cannot book an order they created.
A rejection without a reason wastes everyone's time. The comment is therefore mandatory; the creator receives the reason by email, corrects the order, which returns to draft, and submits it again.
Handle absences without blocking purchasing
A travelling CEO should not freeze a hotel's or a service company's orders. With holiday mode, the CFO approves in their place, and the CFO in turn picks their own delegate. The history shows that the decision was taken by delegation.
Prepare the month-end close
Orders approved but not yet invoiced are expenses to accrue. The accountant sees those awaiting an invoice, chases the supplier, attaches the invoice received and books the order.
At month-end, Awa exports an Excel workbook in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 import template: accruals balanced by month, reversals for the following month, net XPF amounts posted by account and department. Awa does not write directly into Dynamics 365: the accountant imports the file, and Awa does not pay suppliers.