How Kiln made approvals four times faster

Kiln is a 90-person climate software company with teams across North America and Europe. As the company grew, its approval process quietly became its biggest bottleneck. Simple requests like a new software licence or a conference ticket took an average of six days to approve.

Where the time went

When Kiln’s finance lead mapped the process, the problem wasn’t that approvers were slow. It was that requests went to the wrong people, waited in inboxes and had to be resubmitted when details were missing.

• Almost half of all requests were sent to the wrong approver first.

• A third came back for more information before anyone could decide.

• Approvals over $2,000 needed three sign-offs, regardless of what was being bought.

Rules instead of routing

Kiln rebuilt its approval policy in Saro around a few simple rules. Requests under $500 for known vendors are approved automatically. Requests between $500 and $5,000 go to the team’s budget owner. Anything above $5,000, or any new vendor, adds the finance lead.

Each request form asks for exactly what the approver needs: the vendor, the amount, the budget it comes from and a one-line reason. Incomplete requests can’t be submitted, so nothing comes back for more information.

Approve from anywhere

Approvers get a notification in team chat with every detail on one screen and approve with a single click. On the go, they can do the same from the Saro mobile app. Once approved, a virtual card is issued automatically with the exact amount and merchant lock.

The results

• Average approval time: from six days to under 36 hours.

• Auto-approved requests: 41% of all requests now need no human review.

• Policy exceptions: down by 70%, because the rules are built into the form.

“The best approval process is the one people don’t notice. Now the only requests that reach me are the ones that really need a decision.”

Lessons for growing teams

• Write the policy as rules, not paragraphs. If a rule can’t be expressed as an amount, a vendor or a department, it’s probably too vague.

• Auto-approve the boring stuff. Small, repeat purchases from known vendors rarely need a human decision.

• Put the decision where people already work. Approvals in chat get answered in minutes, not days.

Kiln reviews its approval rules every quarter. The latest change raised the auto-approval threshold for software renewals, because the data showed they were approved 100% of the time anyway.