Growing companies: which approvals to ship first

From twenty people toward eighty, verbal rules fail first on leave slips, invoices, and the company seal—not the strategy meeting. Thirty flows at once lets training collapse before the business does. Three–five in phase one matters more than a pretty module tree.

1. P0
   Leave / travel Happens every day; connect to attendance rules so month-end is not a spreadsheet fight. The island of HR-only, no leave tickets: see What happens if you only ship HR and attendance, and skip approvals.
   Must ship in phase one
2. P0
   Expenses / advances Small amounts, high frequency—finance feels it first. Route by amount; chase on timeout.
   Must ship in phase one
3. P0
   Seals Risk is not how often it happens; it is that you cannot trace it. The company seal must bind to a ticket number.
   Must ship in phase one
4. P1
   Contract review Ship when sales, delivery, and finance start sharing the same text. How to split the back office: see Sales, delivery, and finance share contracts: how to split the back office.
   Ship once text is stable
5. P1
   Purchase request If purchasing is recurring and reconciliation hurts, make it a conditional approval.
   Phase two
6. P2
   Project kickoff / full ERP Do not ship while the org is still shifting. See Do you need a full ERP?.
   Explicitly out of scope

Rank by pain, not the module brochure

Ask three questions: how many times a week, what a miss costs, how many people a dispute currently needs. High scores enter phase one. A knowledge base can wait, but go-live day still needs how-tos or new hires ask the group; see Faster onboarding: the value of a knowledge base and processes. Talk cost inside this scope; see What an OA / management system costs, and how long it takes.

Phase one also names a system admin and an exception owner—roles, not people. With no closer, even P0 falls back to the group. Admin should learn the path in thirty minutes. When the dual-run ends, the group no longer takes those three items. Review the list in five minutes of the weekly meeting; you do not need an “IT task force.”

Why more people force a system: see From 20 to 80 people, why management has to be systematized. DaXi writes what we will not do into scope. To phase from your list, go to the Management systems service page. The full path: see From brief to launch: how a management system is built.