The hidden cost of workflow workarounds
When a workflow doesn't work, people route around it. That routing has a cost that never appears on any report.
Workflow workarounds are invisible costs. They don't appear on a cost report. They don't generate support tickets. They show up only in time studies and process audits — the kind of exercise most finance teams never have time to conduct.
A purchase approval workflow that routes to an inbox no one monitors doesn't generate a system error. It generates a phone call, a Slack message, or an email that says 'can you approve this?'. The approval happens outside the system, the transaction is posted anyway, and the workflow becomes ceremonial — a step that exists in the configuration and nowhere else. The cost is the time spent on the workaround, multiplied by every transaction it touches.
The compounding effect is less obvious. When a workflow is known to be broken, the team working around it starts to build the workaround into their process. They schedule the phone calls. They add approval requests to their weekly meeting agendas. They create shared spreadsheets to track approvals that the system was supposed to track. These informal processes are resilient — they work. But they depend entirely on specific people, resist change, and create audit risk because they exist outside the system's control environment.
The fix is usually straightforward once the workaround is surfaced. Most workflow failures trace to a simple cause: the role responsible for an approval step has changed, the email notification goes to a former employee's address, or an approval condition that was correct when the workflow was built no longer matches the current transaction types. A two-hour workflow review catches most of them.
The barrier is visibility. Workarounds are invisible to system administrators who are looking at the system. They're only visible to the people doing the workaround — and those people often don't report them because they've normalised the manual step. Getting a realistic picture of how your approval processes actually work requires talking to the people who use them, not reading the workflow configuration.