If your lending business has multiple staff handling loans, repayments, and accounting, you need controls in place so nothing gets approved without the right eyes on it.
An approval workflow is simply a chain of sign-offs that a loan, repayment, or journal entry must pass through before it becomes active. This guide explains how Lendbox's approval workflows work, how to set one up, and how each role on your team fits into the process.
The Three Types of Approval Workflow
Lendbox supports approval workflows for three kinds of financial action:
Loan approvals control which staff members must sign off before a loan goes active.
Repayment approvals ensure repayments are verified before they are recorded.
Journal approvals add oversight to accounting entries before they are posted.
Every financial action in Lendbox can be placed behind an approval workflow, so nothing goes through unverified.
Part 1: Set Up an Approval Workflow
Step 1: Open Approval Workflows
In the left navigation panel, click Staff Management, then click Approval Workflows.
Step 2: Add a new workflow
Click Add Workflow, then choose the type of workflow you want to set up — loan, repayment, or journal approvals. This guide uses a loan approval workflow as the example.
Step 3: Build the approval chain
Build your approval chain with as many steps as you need. A staff member at each step must approve the loan before it moves forward, and the loan only becomes active once every step is cleared.
Step 4: Configure each step
Click on any step to configure it. For each step, select which staff roles are responsible for approving loans at that point. Fill in the roles for every step in your workflow.
Step 5: Save the workflow
When done, click Save.
Part 2: The Workflow in Action
Step 6: Submit a loan for review
When a loan officer fills in a new loan request and enters all the details, they click Submit for Review. This sends the loan into the approval workflow.
Step 7: Review pending items in the Approval Center
The first approver — for example, a manager — clicks Approval Center in the left navigation panel. This shows everything waiting for approval: loans, repayments, and journal entries in one place. Click on a loan to review it.
Step 8: Review the loan and its position in the chain
On the review screen, you can see all the loan's details. The approval chain shows exactly where the loan is in the workflow, whose turn it is to approve, and who else still needs to sign off before it goes active.
Step 9: Make a decision
After reviewing, the approver can Approve the loan to move it forward, Reject it, or Request Changes if something needs to be corrected.
Part 3: Handling Requested Changes
Step 10: Notify the loan creator
When changes are requested, the loan officer sees a notification at the top alerting them that a loan needs their attention. They click Review Changes to see all loans sent back to them, then click on the loan to proceed.
Step 11: Make the requested changes
At the bottom of the Details tab, the loan officer finds a note from the approver explaining what needs to be updated, and makes the requested changes. Note that only the person who created the loan can edit it when changes have been requested.
Step 12: Resubmit for review
Once editing is done, the loan officer can add a comment, then click Submit for Review and confirm. The loan returns to the start of the approval chain and must be reviewed by everyone again.
Part 4: Final Approval
Step 13: Approve through each step
Each approver in the chain reviews the loan from the Approval Center and approves it in turn. As the loan progresses, the approval chain shows when it is each role's turn to give their sign-off.
Step 14: The loan goes active
Once every approver in the chain has signed off, the loan status changes to active, confirmed on the loan details page.
Repayments and Journal Entries
The same process applies beyond loans:
For repayments, when someone records a payment from a borrower, it passes through an approval chain before it is posted.
For journal entries, when someone logs an expense or adjusts an account balance, the entry sits as a draft until every role defined in your journal approval workflow has signed off.
Done
You now know how approval workflows work in Lendbox — how to build an approval chain, how each role moves an item through the process, and how requested changes are handled. With workflows in place, no loan, repayment, or journal entry goes through unverified.