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 2026-09-03):
"starts at $499 /month billed annually" for Core — Automation from $999/mo.
The 5 September 2026 re-read held both figures and added two things that change how the $499 should be read. First, an Enterprise tier, "Custom billed annually", with "Unlimited users" — so the ladder is gated at the top like most of this category. Second, an AP Module priced separately, also "starts at $499 /month" — purchasing and accounts-payable are two purchases, not one, which is the same per-module shape Connecteam uses for its hubs.
And "starts at" is doing real work in that sentence. The user counts on every tier are tier-based and not published, so $499 is a floor beneath an unstated ladder — the same shape as Cheqroom's starting price per admin. You can learn the minimum from the page and nothing about your own bill.
Procurify — from its own pricing page (read 2026-09-03):
No public price. "We build a quote around your team's needs: products, add-ons, users, and integrations."
Re-read 5 September 2026 — still no figure, and the page states the quote's inputs in fuller words: "Every quote is custom and includes factors like products, add-ons, users, and integrations to come up with pricing that represents how each company intends to use the procurement software." It also frames the product modularly — "start with Purchasing" and "add products as you grow". So both vendors in this category sell by module, and the gated one at least tells you which four things drive its number.
Over three years, Precoro's entry tier alone is $17,964 — and that is the floor, not the quote, since the figure it multiplies is a "starts at" price with unpublished user tiers. It buys 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, catalogs, 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 organization several sizes larger than the one first noticing this problem.
And the self-hosted answer is a project
Look for a self-hosted purchase-approval tool and the answer is unambiguous: the SaaS options are all cloud, and the self-hosted route is an ERP module — ERPNext, Odoo, Dolibarr.
The warning that comes with that route is the same everywhere: generic ERP platforms lean on customization to fit a trade's needs, which usually means hiring consultants or developers, and a customization of that kind is measured in months 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 center, 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 authorized.
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 — $99.00, one time (product page, read 2026-08-20), and one of the four products in the Back-Office Suite.
Try the Approva demo ↗Live, on sample data, no sign-up.
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 authorization 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 8.1+ 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 authorizing. That is the moment this becomes worth ninety-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 formalizes 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 authorized, 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 on 10 August 2026 from the price API behind its web-hosting and cloud pricing pages — 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 customization 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 $99 once.
But if you need invoices matched and suppliers paid, this is the authorization 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 license options
- Spec sheets to product data without a PIM subscription — the same empty shelf between free and $499, in another category
- The SaaS Price Observatory — Precoro, Procurify and every other tracked vendor, 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.