Who Signs Off? Setting Spending Approval Limits as Your Business Grows

In many Nigerian businesses, every payment waits for the owner or the MD. That works with five staff. At fifty, across two sites or branches, the owner becomes the bottleneck: suppliers wait, staff chase, and approvals given in a hurry on the phone leave no record.

The fix is an approval policy: rules, agreed in advance, for who can approve what.

Set tiers by amount

A simple starting point for a growing business:

• Up to ₦50,000: the line manager approves.
• ₦50,000 to ₦500,000: a manager and the finance lead approve.
• Above ₦500,000: a director or the owner gives final sign-off.

Adjust the figures to your size. A large company might start its first tier at ₦500,000 and add a board-level tier. The point is that routine spending moves quickly and large spending always gets senior eyes.

Rules that make approvals work

• Nobody approves their own spending.
• The person who approves a payment is not the only person who can make it.
• Every approval is recorded: who, when and for what.
• Splitting one purchase into several small ones to stay under a limit counts as a breach.
• Name a backup approver for each tier, so travel and leave do not stop payments.

Apply it to bills and claims alike

The same policy should cover supplier bills and staff expense claims. If supplier payments need approval but staff claims do not, spending simply moves to claims. See our guide to staff expense claims.

How Billif helps

Billif has approval policies and approval requests built in. You set the policy once, including several levels of sign-off, and it applies to every payable and expense claim submitted for approval. Pending requests show on the dashboard, so nothing stalls quietly, and each decision is recorded.