Ask anyone who has worked in a company with a real approval chain and you will usually get the same story. A vendor contract is ready. Legal has looked at it. The one person whose approval it needs is on a beach until the 14th, and the deal’s start date is the 9th. Someone asks whether anyone can just forward the email to a colleague. Someone else asks whether that counts.
The usual fix is informal. The approver’s assistant gets their login, or the approval happens in a reply-all thread and gets pasted into the file afterward. Both work, and both leave you unable to say later who actually approved what, under whose authority.
What a stand-in can do in Contrayo
An approval step in Contrayo lists named people. A delegation grant says that one person may act for another between two points in time. While the grant is in effect, the stand-in becomes eligible to act on the absent person’s steps, and nothing about the underlying policy changes. The policy still names the original approver, so when the grant ends there is nothing to put back.
A few details matter in practice:
- The stand-in sees the step in their own “what’s waiting on me” list. When a step becomes ready while the grant is already in effect, they are notified about it, and so is the original approver, because delegation adds a person without removing one. If the absent person checks their phone from the beach and approves it, that works too.
- The stand-in’s action is recorded under their own name, along with the person they stood in for and the specific grant that authorized it. The contract’s history reads “Dana (on behalf of Priya)”, not just “Priya”.
- Segregation of duties follows the delegation. When the policy has it switched on, which is the default, and Priya approved an earlier step, her stand-in cannot sign the final step for the same contract, and Priya cannot sign it herself either. Standing in for someone does not create a way around the rule.
- A grant has a start and, optionally, an end. When the end passes, the stand-in’s eligibility stops, and Contrayo does not need anyone to remember to switch it off.
- Grants are never edited. A correction is a new grant that supersedes the old one, and the earlier grant stays on record.
- If the person who granted a delegation is deactivated in the organization, their grants stop working until they are reactivated. Removing someone’s access should not leave their authority running through a stand-in.
Where it is limited
A grant names one stand-in for one person, as a named individual. It does not follow a role, so “whoever covers Finance this week” is still something to maintain by hand.
And if a step needs every listed approver to weigh in, the stand-in fills the absent person’s place, and the other listed approvers still need to act. Delegation covers one person’s absence, not the rest of the step.
The version of this we would want
The pain in the vacation story is rarely that nobody could approve. It is that nobody could say who did. A deal that moves because a stand-in acted under a recorded grant, with a start, an end and a name beside the action, is a different thing from one that moves because someone borrowed a password. See how this fits with the approval engine, including how steps are sequenced and how segregation of duties is checked.