As experts in finance and accounting for small to medium-sized companies, the team around Andreas Kranzusch and Till Hahndorf offers interim CFO services, among other things. When working with a number of companies, one problem kept cropping up: the approval process for invoices, payments, budgets or vacations was either a chaotic, opaque and error-prone process in every company, or tools were used that were expensive, complicated and not used consistently.
A solution was therefore needed that would allow approval processes of all kinds to be handled simply, digitally and as automatically as possible. The project was based on an existing system that CFOxt was already using internally. However, it quickly became clear that the application, which was based on custom code, could only have been further developed and scaled at great expense in terms of time and money due to its complexity. In the search for a cost-effective and efficient solution, the CFOxt team came across the topic of low-code - and thus also VisualMakers.
In addition to the complexity of the application, data protection is a top priority in any type of approval process. With Xano.com as a scalable low-code backend with database, API endpoints and workflow logic, the application can be hosted on German servers in Frankfurt. Bubble.io forms the front end of the application and can display pixel-perfect designs that were previously created in Figma. Bubble is configured in such a way that no personal data is processed or stored there.
CFOxt's internal accounting works with a specially developed Ninox application, and Xano is linked directly to Ninox via an interface in order to maintain this and synchronize the data. Make.com is used to generate audit-proof PDFs for the history of individual transactions - as well as to transfer data from Ninox back to the main application.
Approvers are notified by email via the transactional email service Sendgrid as soon as there is something new to approve. By clicking on the link in the email, the approver is forwarded directly to the approval view, where they can view, edit and approve the PDF with the previous process. Users can use the portal to start new processes, manage existing ones and enter documents and invoices.
A comprehensive rights management system ensures that only authorized persons have access to ongoing processes.
Instead of having to process opaque approval requests by email or Excel spreadsheet, CFOxt customers can now complete their approval processes in no time at all. The intuitive dashboard view gives users an overview of the status of open processes. They can easily enter documents and invoices in the detailed view. In the admin view, approver lists can be created in an individual order so that all necessary approvals can be obtained from the right people as quickly as possible. With the audit-proof audit trail in PDF format, users can track the history of every process.
With the new application, managing the approval processes of CFOxt customers is a breeze: not only do they save an enormous amount of time, but the process is more transparent, less error-prone and much more user-friendly for everyone involved than before.
