Approvals That Route Themselves: Workflow in QuantX Ops
Multi-stage approval that resolves to a position rather than a name, branches on real conditions, and tells you when a step has nobody who can answer it.
The approval everybody remembers is the one that sat with a manager who was on leave. Routing by name creates that problem; routing by position does not.
How a request finds its approver
A workflow step names a role or a relationship — "the raiser's line manager", "the head of the department the cost belongs to", "anybody holding the Finance Approver role". At the moment a request is submitted, QuantX Ops resolves that to a real person using the position tree. Change who sits in the seat and the routing changes with it.
Conditions, not one path for everything
A ₹4,000 expense and a ₹4,00,000 purchase order should not take the same route. Steps can branch on the document's own values — amount, cost category, who raised it, which project — so the approval chain is as long as the risk warrants and no longer.
Versioning: a change applies to new requests only
When you edit a definition, requests already in flight keep the version they started on. This matters more than it sounds: an approver who is halfway through a chain should not find the rules changed underneath them, and an audit a year later should show the process that was actually followed, not the one currently configured.
It tells you when a step is unanswerable
A step assigned to a role nobody holds cannot route — the request would simply wait forever. QuantX Ops counts those and shows them on the setup checklist, so the gap is found before a request falls into it rather than after.
Related: why the seat holds the org chart.