Purchase Approvals — The Empty Shelf Between $499 a Month and an ERP Project
Precoro starts at $499/month. Procurify won't quote publicly. The self-hosted answer is an ERP module that takes months to configure. For a business that just needs "two signatures over £2,000," there is nothing in between.
Somewhere between "the owner approves everything" and "we have a procurement department," most growing businesses hit the same wall: purchases are being made that nobody explicitly approved, and the first anyone knows is the invoice.
The fix is not complicated. It is a rule — anything over this amount needs a second signature — plus a record that the signature happened. What is complicated is that the software market has almost nothing at that size.
What the market offers
Precoro — from its own pricing page (read 2026-07-05):
"starts at $499 /month billed annually" for Core — Automation from $999/mo.
Procurify — from its own pricing page (read 2026-07-05):
No public price. "We offer flexible pricing based on features and support needs. Talk to our team…"
Over three years, Precoro's entry tier alone is $17,964 — for a system whose core function, at small scale, is routing a request to a second person.
That is not a criticism of Precoro. At its intended size — real procurement teams, catalogues, budgets, three-way matching against receipts and invoices — it is a coherent platform and the price reflects the work it does. It is simply built for an organisation several sizes larger than the one first noticing this problem.
And the self-hosted answer is a project
When we searched this category on 1 August 2026, the results were unambiguous: the SaaS options are all cloud, and the self-hosted route is an ERP module — ERPNext, Odoo, Dolibarr.
The same results volunteered the warning:
"generic ERP platforms rely heavily on customization to serve trade-specific needs, often meaning hiring consultants or developers, which increases cost and time to launch — customizations can take months or longer to build, maintain, and scale."
So a fifteen-person business that wants two signatures over £2,000 is offered a $499/month platform or a months-long ERP configuration. That is an empty shelf, and it is the shelf most businesses are standing in front of.
What actually needs to exist
Strip the category back and the requirement is small:
- A request — what, how much, which cost centre, which supplier.
- A threshold rule — over this amount, more approvers.
- A separation rule — nobody approves their own request.
- A numbered purchase order the supplier will accept.
- A record you can export when somebody asks how a spend was authorised.
Item 3 is the one that makes it a control rather than a form. A workflow where the requester can approve their own request is a workflow that documents spending without governing it.
The one-time option
Approva is self-hosted purchase-order approval — $39.00, one time (product page, read 2026-08-01).
Its threshold model, in its own words:
"You set amounts in your own currency. A request at or above the first threshold needs a second approver; at or above the second, a third. Below the first threshold, one approver is enough, and an approver can never approve their own request."
That last clause is the whole control, and it is stated as a property rather than a setting you might forget to turn on. Everything else in this category is bookkeeping around that one rule.
Three roles — requester, approver, admin — which is the right number. Below three you cannot express separation of duties; above three you are building a permissions system nobody will maintain.
What it deliberately does not do
Quoted rather than buried, because these decide whether it fits:
"Does it pay vendors?" — "No, deliberately. Approva approves purchase requests and issues purchase orders. It does not process payments or connect to your bank or AP system — paying the supplier happens in your accounting tool after you send the PO."
"Does it integrate with QuickBooks, Xero, or SAP?" — "Not directly. Approva exports the register as CSV/JSON… it does not post to a general ledger."
So it is the authorisation step and nothing downstream. If what you actually want is accounts-payable automation — invoice capture, three-way matching, payment runs — this is not that, and Precoro genuinely is.
And one detail that matters more than it looks: "Plain PHP 8 with MySQL (or SQLite for zero-config), no Composer, no Node, no cron jobs." No cron means there is no scheduled job to silently stop working — everything happens when somebody clicks something. For a control system, fewer moving parts is a feature.
Who this is for
Yes if: you have grown past informal approval, you want a threshold and a second signature, you need numbered POs suppliers will accept, and you want a record for your accountant or auditor. Typically ten to a hundred people, one finance person, no procurement team.
Yes, particularly, if you have just had the conversation — an invoice arrived that nobody remembers authorising. That is the moment this becomes worth thirty-nine dollars.
No if: you need AP automation, invoice matching, or payment runs — buy Precoro or get a Procurify quote.
No if: you already run an ERP with a procurement module. Use it. A second system is worse than an imperfect one you already have.
No if: you are five people and the owner sees every invoice. Approval software formalises a control you do not yet need, and formality has its own cost.
The honest costs
The register is the audit trail. If somebody asks in two years how a £14,000 purchase was authorised, the answer lives in a database on your server. Back it up and test the restore.
No accounting integration. CSV out, then reconcile.
Adoption is the real risk, not the software. A threshold rule works only if requests actually go through it. The failure mode is not technical — it is somebody ringing the supplier directly because it is faster. Decide who enforces that before you install anything.
Hosting. Ordinary shared hosting. For a concrete number from a named provider: Hetzner's own pricing — machine-read from the price API behind their pricing pages on 10 Aug 2026 — lists web-hosting plans from €1.60 to €16.72 a month and entry cloud servers from €3.99 a month (prices as returned for their German datacenters; confirm current pricing and VAT treatment at checkout). Any comparable host works — the point is that the "own" side of this comparison costs single-digit euros a month.
The short version
Purchase approval is priced for procurement departments: $499/month published, or a quote. The self-hosted alternative is an ERP customisation measured in months.
For a business that needs "over £2,000 requires two signatures, and nobody signs their own" plus a numbered PO and an exportable record, that is $39 once.
But if you need invoices matched and suppliers paid, this is the authorisation step only — and the platforms that do the rest are priced the way they are because they do considerably more.
Next steps
- Open the live Approva demo — no sign-up, already signed in, resets itself
- Approva product page and licence options
- The SaaS Price Observatory — Precoro, Procurify and 80 others, quoted from their own pages, with quote-gated vendors recorded as quote-gated
Prices are quoted from each vendor's own pricing page with the date read. Where a vendor publishes no price, we record that rather than repeating a figure from a comparison site.