Devising Signature Authority Matrix for your organization in Low-code landscape

In the dynamic business era, there is a pressing need for streamlining processes, minimizing risks, automating workflows, and compliance adherence. With all this fast-paced technology calling, unauthorized expenses can slip through, causing a budget overrun. Decisions stall due to an unidentified chain of command, leading to a misalignment in strategic priorities.

With too many blessing hands, understanding and monitoring the approval could be more key and critical. There is a need for quick decision-making with clarity on who, why, what, and how.

Whether approving multimillion-dollar contracts, managing procurement workflows, or ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements, a key understanding of who approves it against the eligibility changes the dynamics.

An unauthorized person signing off for a major expense or a delay in approving a critical delay costs a fortune. And these aren’t rare occurrences; they are everyday business challenges.

With the advent of low-code development, building an app for business needs is a quick reality today. However, the authority to approve and manage the process is still a question that circles the inbox of multiple stakeholders.

In our recent deployment, we encountered a similar situation, for which we found a solution in the form of a Signature Authority Matrix. Effective customized solutions, in a fraction of time and cost involved in conventional development, best of both worlds, right?

Building the Signature Authority Matrix in Microsoft Power Platform.

An authority signatory is someone in a company who has the official and legal power to sign invoices and contracts and approve spendings. They are responsible for all financial and contract-related actions and should check and approve many things to keep the company’s finances in order. Having an authority signatory means you can stop unapproved spending, make sure contracts are properly reviewed, and keep your finances in check.

We can harness the revolutionary power of Power Platform to build an authority matrix tailored to the organization’s needs. The approval matrix can further be extended and integrated into other systems e.g. ERP, JD Edwards etc. to ensure the integrity of approver data for different thresholds across different systems.

There are essentially three pillars fundamental to setting up a holistic signature Authority matrix for your organization –

1. User interface – A user-friendly interface for authorized folks to view requests, create new requests to establish authorized signatories for different thresholds, and track the status of their requests. Upon creating a new request, request will be routed to the relevant approvers (who are configured to be approving the authorized signatories to be set for different thresholds in the approval matrix). Canvas Apps can be utilized to set up the front-end of this application and Dataverse can be used to locally store all the master and transaction data.
2. Notifications – Sending out email notifications at different stages to the approvers to approve/reject the change requested in the authority matrix, to the requester, and to other legal teams, informing them of the change in the authority matrix is an imperative facet of the whole process. Power Automate can be utilized to send out notifications and perform other backend operations.
3. Integration with external systems – Once the approval steps are completed, the updated authority signatory details can be integrated into other data sources/systems as applicable. Power Automate can be utilized to connect to external systems.

In addition to the above indispensable features, below are few other crucial aspects to look out for while implementing Signature Authority Matrix –

Security

Security and confidentiality are cornerstones of the Authority matrix to prevent unauthorized access. Security and role-based access can be handled using Power Platform security role and Azure groups.

Data Integrity

It’s imperative that we have updated Authorized signers across different systems. Data-driven decisions can only be as strong as the data they’re based on. In addition to on request data sync, schedulers built on top of Power Automate can be implemented to ensure that data is synchronized across all the systems on a regular basis.

Integration failures and exceptions

In case of integration failures or a failure at any of the checkpoints, a strong error handling and retry mechanism build on top of Power Automate will ensure that we mitigate any unexpected scenarios and risks and have the essential rollback/retry mechanism as applicable.

Having a Signing authority is a key aspect in ensuring legal compliance within the organization. In fact, a Forrester study found that using Power Platform for productivity gains on high-impact use-cases saved up to 250 hours per user annually, locking as much as 12% of an employee’s time for new, productive work. One interviewee highlighted that processes once taking three to six weeks and requiring 10 full-time employees (FTEs) were reduced to just one hour with only two FTEs, thanks to Power Apps.  

Microsoft Power Platform—a comprehensive low-code solution that spans application development, process automation, external websites, and intelligent copilots is an outstanding platform to build an Authority matrix tailored for your firm.  With a low-code platform that enables more makers to design and deploy applications; while accelerating the work of professional developers, an all-encompassing range of pivotal use cases can be addressed in an exceptionally minuscule fragment of effort and time.