Not every asset should be handed out on request. A stack of pens, sure. Grab one, no questions asked. A $4,000 camera kit, a company vehicle, or a piece of medical equipment is a different story, and most organisations know it needs some sign-off before it leaves the building. The mistake is either skipping that sign-off entirely (informal "just ask your manager" arrangements that nobody actually follows consistently) or over-engineering it into a bottleneck that makes people avoid using the system at all.
Here's how to actually get this right.
Step 1: Decide Which Assets Genuinely Need Approval
Not everything does. A good rule of thumb: require approval for anything that's expensive to replace, restricted for safety or liability reasons, or frequently in short supply. Everything else should be a straightforward checkout. Adding friction to low-stakes items is exactly what pushes people to work around the system instead of through it.
Step 2: Decide Who Should Approve. And How Many Steps It Actually Needs
Most requests genuinely need one approver: the department manager who owns the equipment. But some situations need more:
- A single step: the department manager approves, done. This covers the overwhelming majority of cases.
- Two steps: a technical lead confirms the requester is qualified to use it (a specific tool, a vehicle, a piece of lab equipment), then the manager signs off on the business justification.
- Named approver, not just a role (sometimes the right approver isn't "whoever manages that department" but a specific person entirely) the one team member certified to sign off on a particular asset category, regardless of their formal title.
The temptation is to build a five-step chain "to be safe." Resist it. Every additional step is another place a request can sit untouched while someone's on leave. Match the number of steps to genuine risk, not to how important the asset feels.
Step 3: Build the Chain, and Let It Override the Default
A well-designed system should let a specific chain take priority over a generic fallback rule (like "ask the department manager") the moment one exists for that asset. So you're not managing two competing approval concepts at once. Set the chain up once per asset (or asset category), assign each step a specific approver or a role, and every future checkout request for that item routes itself automatically.
Step 4: Make Sure Approvers Can Actually See What's Waiting on Them
An approval chain is only as good as how visible pending requests are to the people who need to act on them. If a manager has to remember to log in and check, requests sit. A working system should surface "waiting on you" clearly (a badge, a count, a notification) the moment they log in, not buried in a report they have to go looking for.
Step 5: Watch for the Two Failure Modes
Requests silently going to the wrong person. This is the single most common approval-chain bug in practice: a chain gets configured, but some other part of the system (a dashboard count, a scan screen, a direct-assign shortcut) still checks the old "department manager" rule instead of the actual chain. So the requester sees one name, and the person who's actually supposed to act sees nothing. If you ever see a mismatch between "who the system says should approve this" in two different places, that's exactly this bug, and it's worth testing every screen that touches approval, not just the main request page.
Bottlenecking on people who are unavailable. A named approver who's on leave with no backup turns a two-day process into a two-week one. If your chain has a named individual at any step, make sure there's a way to reassign or a fallback role, not a hard dependency on one person always being reachable.
What This Looks Like in Dozz.ai
Dozz.ai supports exactly this: build a multi-step approval chain per asset, with each step assigned to a specific person or a role, and it takes priority over the simple department-manager default the moment it exists. Consistently, across every screen where an approval decision gets made (the checkout request itself, the scan-to-return flow, dashboard approval counts, and email/in-app notifications), not just the main approvals page. Whoever's up next in the chain sees it the moment they log in, with nothing to remember to go check.
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