Every finance team says they have an approval process. The following usage data from ApprovalMax shows what that actually means in practice – and gives you something concrete to compare your own process against.
Over the past 12 months, 18,000+ organisations in 100+ countries processed more than 20 million bills, purchase orders and invoices through ApprovalMax on top of Xero. That’s over 37 million individual approval decisions – every one recorded, and resolved before the document reached the ledger.
Here are some standout data points that can help you check your own process against them.
Approval workflows in Xero-based finance teams increasingly rely on multi-step sign-off and automated routing rather than a single signature. Across 18,000+ organisations and 37 million+ approval decisions over 12 months, more than 70% use multi-step approval (2.4 steps on average) and nearly 85% use conditional rules that route documents automatically by amount, supplier, account or tracking category. The most effective setups resolve and log every document before it reaches the ledger — making approval a gate, not a record.
This data covers 12 months to July 2026, aggregated and anonymised across 18,000+ organisations using ApprovalMax with Xero:
While the data above tells us the widespread usage of ApprovalMax, there’s a story to be told about the financial workflows, processes and protocols in businesses across the world.
From the data, we can see that over 70% of organisations run multi-step approval, averaging 2.4 steps per workflow. A typical pattern for this would be: the budget holder confirms the spend is legitimate, finance confirms the coding, and a director signs off above a threshold.
The logic is simple: one person saying yes isn’t really a control – it’s a formality. A control needs an independent check: someone other than the requester confirming the spend is valid. When a single approver waves everything through (or approves their own purchases), there’s no second set of eyes to catch an error, a duplicate, or a fraudulent invoice. Multi-step approval is what separates “we check our invoices” from segregation of duties an auditor will accept.
Benchmark yourself: if every document in your business is approved by one person – or worse, by the same person who created it – you’re behind how most businesses at this scale operate.
Nearly 85% of workflows use conditional rules. This means that documents route automatically by amount, supplier, account or tracking category: a £200 stationery order takes a short path, a £20,000 contractor invoice goes through additional scrutiny – without anyone deciding case by case.
Most companies have an approval policy in a document somewhere. The data shows what mature finance teams do differently: they turn the policy into routing rules, so following it isn’t optional and chasing it isn’t anyone’s job.
Approval increasingly happens where the knowledge is, not where the licence is. Budget holders and department leads approve spend without needing access to Xero itself – they see the document, the history and the budget context, decide, and move on.
You shouldn’t need an audit to know where you stand. Three questions:
1. Does anything reach Xero unapproved? Across these 18,000+ businesses, documents are resolved before they touch the ledger – the approval isn’t a record of what happened, it’s a gate.
2. Would a £500 and a £50,000 invoice follow different paths – automatically? If routing depends on someone remembering the policy, you have a policy, not a control.
3. Could you hand your auditor a complete ApprovalMax on top of Xero in minutes? Every one of those 37 million decisions is logged: who approved what, when, and on what basis.
If any answer is no, the fix is smaller than it sounds. Most teams build their first workflow in an afternoon.
Start a ApprovalMax on top of Xero, connect your Xero organisation, and have your first approval workflow live today – approvers don’t need access to Xero to use it.
Methodology: figures are aggregated, anonymised production data covering the 12 months to July 2026 across organisations using ApprovalMax with Xero. Workflow metrics cover bill and purchase order workflows on current workflow versions.