5 Signs Your Team Has Outgrown Slack-Based Purchase Approvals
Slack is great. We use it. You probably use it. For a small team, it absorbs a hundred different workflows: standups, water-cooler chat, customer support, and yes — purchase approvals.
But there's a moment when "hey, can I buy this?" in a Slack channel stops being efficient and starts being expensive. Most teams blow past this moment without noticing.
Here are the five signs you've outgrown Slack-based approvals — pulled from real conversations with founders and operations leads at companies between 5 and 50 people.
Sign 1: You can't find the original approval anymore
A finance audit comes around. Your bookkeeper asks: "Who approved the $1,800 we paid Acme Marketing in February?"
You scroll back through Slack. Maybe it's in #general. Maybe in a DM. Maybe in #ops. Maybe in the now-archived #expenses-2024 channel. Maybe it was a thread inside a different conversation. Maybe it was just a thumbs-up emoji on a screenshot of an invoice.
If finding a specific approval takes more than 30 seconds, you have a real problem. Not a "nice to have a tool" problem — a "you legally cannot answer questions about your own spending" problem. Slack is not a system of record for financial decisions, no matter how organized your channels are.
Sign 2: Receipts go missing — a lot
This is the dead giveaway.
Every small business has the same shameful spreadsheet: the bookkeeper's "missing receipts" list. It grows every month. People forward receipts to email addresses that don't exist anymore. Photos of receipts get sent to a Slack channel and then buried under 200 other messages. People genuinely intend to send the receipt and then forget for three weeks.
By the end of the year, you're missing receipts for 20–40% of your spending. At tax time, you can't claim those expenses. You're literally paying more in taxes because your receipt workflow is in a chat app.
Quick math: if your team spends $80,000 a year and 25% of receipts are missing, you're failing to deduct $20,000. At a 25% effective tax rate, that's $5,000 a year in unnecessary taxes. Your approval tool just paid for itself a hundred times over.
Sign 3: You're the bottleneck for $40 decisions
Be honest. How many of these are sitting in your Slack DMs right now?
- "Hey, can I buy a new mouse? Mine died."
- "Need to renew Figma — $15/month."
- "Office is out of coffee, ok if I grab some?"
- "Want to buy a $30 plugin for the design tool."
If you're approving every $20–$100 spend personally, your team isn't faster because you're "involved" — they're slower because they're waiting for you. And worse, you're getting interrupted constantly.
The fix isn't to "trust people more" or to "set up an honor system." The fix is rules. "Anyone in Engineering can spend up to $200/month on dev tools without asking. Above that, ping the engineering lead. Above $1,500, ping me." Slack can't enforce that. Real software can.
Sign 4: You can't answer "where did the money go last quarter?"
Try this exercise. Without opening QuickBooks, answer:
- How much did your team spend on software last quarter?
- Which department spent the most on vendor purchases?
- What was your largest single approved expense in the last 90 days?
- How many requests are pending right now?
If you can't answer any of these in 30 seconds, your approval process has no analytics. Slack threads don't roll up into reports. They don't categorize spend. They don't tell you which department is consistently over budget. They give you no visibility at all — they just give you the feeling of visibility because you saw the messages go by.
Sign 5: New hires don't know how to ask
This is the subtle one that hits hardest.
Your newest engineer needs a $80 cable. She doesn't know:
- Whether to ask in
#engineeringor#generalor DM her manager - Whether to use the company card she was given or get reimbursed
- Whether the $80 needs approval or is just fine
- Who to send the receipt to (if anyone)
- Whether to mention what project it's for
So she does one of three things: spends her own money silently and never gets reimbursed (bad), buys it on the company card and you find out at the end of the month (bad), or sends a hesitant Slack message that gets answered three days later (also bad).
A real approval workflow gives every new hire a single clear path: open the app, submit a request, follow the prompts. They don't have to learn your team's tribal knowledge to expense a cable.
What to do once you recognize the signs
If three or more of these hit, you've outgrown Slack approvals. The good news: setting up a real workflow is fast. Most teams do it in an afternoon.
The basic playbook:
- Stop using Slack channels for approvals as of next Monday. Send a clear team-wide message: "All purchase requests now go through [tool]. Slack messages will not be approved."
- Pick a tool that lives on phones. Most approvals happen when the approver is not at their desk. Web-only tools die.
- Set spending thresholds so the owner stops being the bottleneck for small purchases.
- Make receipts mandatory. No closing a request without uploading one. This single change recovers most of your "lost" deductions.
- Run it for two weeks before tweaking. Most teams over-engineer their first version. Start simple.
We built Becision specifically for this transition. It's the simplest dedicated approval tool we could design — the one we wished we'd had at our last companies. Free for small teams, mobile-first, AI-assisted. Set up an account in five minutes.
But the tool doesn't matter as much as the decision. If you're seeing these signs, you already know what's wrong. Pick something. Anything. Stop running approvals out of a chat app. Your team will thank you.
A final note for the "we're fine, Slack works" crowd
Every team thinks Slack works for approvals — until the moment they realize how much it's been costing them. Lost receipts. Bottlenecked owners. Forgotten approvals. Confused new hires. Spend you can't explain.
The tax bill at the end of the year doesn't lie. The bookkeeper's frustrated emails don't lie. Your own DMs full of "hey, can I buy this?" don't lie.
You're not fine. You're just used to it.