Every business gives away money in small, reasonable exceptions: a bigger discount to win a deal, a special price for a loyal customer, a waived service charge, a dealer claim paid in full. Each one makes sense. Together they are one of the largest uncontrolled costs in a sales organisation.
The answer is not to remove the exceptions. It is to make every exception go through someone who is allowed to grant it — quickly, visibly, and with a record.
The trouble with informal approvals
- "Sir said okay on the phone." Approval exists, but cannot be shown later.
- Limits are in people's heads, so they are applied differently by different managers.
- Salespeople wait without knowing whether a request was even seen.
- Finance finds out at month-end, from the margin report.
What a good approval workflow looks like
- Clear limits. Up to a certain discount, the salesperson decides. Above it, a named role decides.
- The request carries its context: the customer, the products, the price asked, the reason.
- The approver sees everything waiting on them in one place, not scattered across chats.
- The requester sees the status — pending, approved, rejected — without chasing.
- Every decision is recorded: who, when, and what exactly was approved.
How approvals work in Zaqnet
Approvals run through ControlRoom's Approvals app, which shows each person what is waiting on them and what they have asked for:
- Quote discounts in the CRM that need sign-off go to the people allowed to approve them.
- Dealer and distributor claims go to those who can approve money onto a dealer's ledger — see trade schemes and dealer claims.
- Waivers of service charges on technician jobs go to those who may waive them — see AMC management.
- Your own approval rules can add steps to other workflows.
Who may decide what is set with permissions, not by habit: in the built-in roles, field staff and managers raise and work on records, while owners and admins approve discounts, claims and waivers. Separately, custom pricing on an order line is a permission of its own, so you choose who is even offered the option of changing a price.
A good approval process makes "yes" fast and "who said yes?" answerable.
Setting your limits
Start with three questions for each type of exception:
- What can the person closest to the customer decide alone?
- Who decides above that, and who stands in when they are away?
- What does the approver need to see to decide in under a minute?
Write the answers down, set them up as permissions and rules, and review the decisions once a month. Most teams find a handful of exceptions accounted for most of the money.