Maker-checker approvals in accounting are often seen as a way to improve control and reduce errors. However, in many firms, adding more approval steps does not lead to better outcomes. Instead, when approvals are spread across emails, spreadsheets, CRMs, and messaging tools, they create delays, confusion, and limited visibility.
This guide explains why poorly designed approval workflows slow firms down and how embedding maker-checker processes into structured workflows improves both accuracy and efficiency. It shows how clear ownership, automated routing, and real-time visibility can reduce errors while maintaining delivery speed.
What you’ll learn:
- Why more approvals do not automatically improve control
- How fragmented approval processes create delays and confusion
- The common issues in traditional maker-checker workflows
- Why unclear ownership leads to duplicated effort and missed steps
- How poor workflow design increases error risk
- What effective maker-checker processes look like in practice
- Why approvals must be embedded into the workflow, not added on top
- How disconnected systems break approval visibility and auditability
- Where to place approval steps for maximum impact
- How automation and clear routing reduce manual follow ups
- Why connecting approvals with task and workflow management improves delivery
- How structured approval workflows reduce errors without slowing teams down
There is a common assumption in accounting firms that more approvals mean more control.
On paper, that sounds sensible: if more work is reviewed before it moves forward, surely your processes will generate less errors and be more compliant.
In practice, that is not always what happens.
A lot of firms already have some form of maker-checker approval process in place. The issue is that those approval steps often live in too many places at once. Say a manager signs something off in email, a team member updates a spreadsheet, a note sits in the CRM, a task is tracked in practice management, or someone chases an answer on Teams. Everyone is technically following a process, but nobody has a full picture of what has been approved, what is waiting, and what happens next.
That is where things start to slow down.
More approvals do not automatically mean better control
Most firms are not struggling because they forgot to add approval steps. They are struggling because those steps are inconsistent, hard to see and easy to bypass.
This is what traditional approval workflows in accounting often look like in the real world. A piece of work is completed by one person, then sent on for review. The reviewer is busy, so the item sits. The original owner is not sure whether it has been seen. The client deadline is moving closer, so someone follows up manually, a comment comes back, but only part of the team sees it. The work is updated and sent again, meanwhile, another system still shows the task as open, and another person is working from old information.
That is not a control environment. It is a collection of workarounds.
The problem is not simply delay, but uncertainty. When status is unclear, teams spend time chasing updates, second guessing ownership, and duplicating effort. Errors still slip through because the process is not truly enforced and there is often no clean audit trail behind what happened.
Why maker-checker slows firms down when it is badly designed
Maker-checker sounds straightforward. One person prepares the work, and another person reviews and approves it.
The trouble starts when that approval layer is added on top of an already messy process.
If the workflow underneath is fragmented, approvals add friction without adding much clarity. Teams do not just review work: they chase it, rekey it, move it between systems, and try to work out who is waiting on whom. What should feel like a quality control step becomes an admin burden.
This is why some firms end up frustrated by accounting workflow controls. They have introduced more checkpoints, but not more certainty. Staff still do not know who owns the next step, reviewers do not have the right context when work reaches them, managers cannot easily see where work is stuck, and delivery teams feel like progress depends on constant follow up rather than a system that carries the process forward.
So the approval step gets blamed. But the approval is not the real problem. The lack of cohesion around it is.
What effective maker-checker actually looks like
A strong maker-checker process is not just “review before completion”.
It is a structured workflow with clear ownership, clear sequencing and clear visibility. It is built into the way work moves through the firm, not bolted on afterwards.
That means a few things:
- First, the approval point needs to sit inside the workflow itself. The task should move to the right person automatically when the previous step is complete. Nobody should need to remember to send an email, update a spreadsheet, or tap someone on the shoulder.
- Second, ownership should be obvious. The maker knows what they are responsible for. The checker knows what is waiting for their review. Everyone else who needs visibility can see the current status without having to ask.
- Third, the process must be enforced. If approval is required, work should not quietly move on without it. If changes are requested, that should be captured properly. If something is approved, there should be a record of who approved it, when and why.
That is where practice management approvals become useful rather than obstructive. They stop being extra admin and start acting as part of the firm’s operating system.
Why this breaks in disconnected systems
This is where many firms run into trouble.
A joined-up maker-checker process is very hard to maintain when the client journey is split across separate tools. A prospect starts in one system, onboarding happens somewhere else, AML checks sit in another platform, delivery work lives in practice management, and documents are stored elsewhere. On top of all this, approvals happen across whichever channel feels quickest at the time.
The result is predictable: data gets rekeyed, context gets lost, and the same task is interpreted differently in different places. Teams end up relying on memory, habit and manual follow up to bridge the gaps between systems. Even when people are doing good work, the structure around them makes reducing errors in accounting processes much harder than it needs to be.
This is also where compliance risk creeps in. Not always because somebody has made a major mistake, but because the record is incomplete. If information is spread across inboxes, chat messages, spreadsheets and disconnected tools, there is no reliable single source of truth. That makes it harder to evidence decisions, spot bottlenecks and manage quality at scale.
How to implement maker-checker without slowing delivery
The firms that do this well usually take a more selective and more operational approach.
They do not add approvals everywhere. They define where approval genuinely matters.
For example, you may need approval at onboarding, at a key compliance stage, before a return is submitted, or before a final document goes out to a client. You probably do not need extra review steps on every minor action across the process.
That distinction matters, because too many approval points create drag, while the right approval points create control.
From there, the focus should be on designing the flow end to end. The work should move cleanly from CRM into onboarding, from onboarding into AML, and from there into delivery, without teams having to rebuild the same context at each stage. Approval workflows should sit inside that journey, not outside it.
Routing should be automatic, notifications should be timely, and status should be visible. If a task is waiting for approval, the right people should know. If it is overdue, that should be visible too. If work is sent back for changes, ownership should be explicit.
This is also why accounting compliance workflows work best when task tracking, time tracking and approvals are connected. Approval does not happen in isolation. Instead, it affects capacity, deadlines, handoffs and client delivery. When firms can see those things together, they can manage them properly.
What changes when the process is right
When maker-checker is embedded properly, firms usually notice the same shift:
- Errors go down, not because people are being watched more closely, but because the process leaves less room for ambiguity. Work is reviewed at the right points, by the right people, with the right context.
- Delivery gets faster, because teams stop losing time to chasing, forwarding, checking and rechecking status.
- Compliance becomes easier to manage, because the workflow itself produces a stronger record of what happened.
- Leaders gain better visibility, because they can see where work is sitting, where approvals are delayed, and where pressure is building.
Most importantly, the day-to-day experience improves. People spend less time managing the gaps between systems and more time doing the work they are actually there to do.
That is the real value of maker-checker approvals in accounting. Not adding more steps for the sake of it but creating a process that gives firms both control and momentum.
If approvals are slowing your firm down today, it is worth asking a simple question: Do you have too much review, or do you have too little visibility into how work actually moves?
