Yoco automates complex approvals to move at speed

ApprovalMax is quick and easy. It allows you to give responsibility for reviewing and approving documents to the right people in the business, and helps distribute the responsibility to the people who need it and takes any guesswork out.

When Yoco first launched in South Africa in 2015, it changed the game for businesses across the country and allowed many merchants to accept card payments for the first time. Since then, more than 200,000 small businesses are growing their operations with Yoco and over $2bn is processed through Yoco’s network each year. Yoco came to the market with an offering all about access to get paid in the fastest and simplest way possible. 

Now, operating in a landscape where digital is the norm, the business has evolved to meet the changing needs of its customers, both in its services and operations.

We took a very traditional banking process and replaced it with something much quicker and easier.

“Yoco now isn’t just a card machine. It’s a whole platform for your small, medium, and even large business, where you can load your products online, your staff, set up tipping for people, and integrate to your website to take payments online. It’s a whole financial ecosystem.”

Operating at scale

The business has grown rapidly to support hundreds of thousands of customers. With this fast expansion, however, came the need for robust systems and processes to help Yoco’s hundreds of employees work efficiently. 

“When the business just started, it was a case of just doing whatever it takes to get the job done. Everyone was doing everything,” says Martin. “Now we’re at an interesting stage where we actually need a little bit more process and structure in order to support operating at scale.”

Technology plays a big part in creating a scalable structure to support Yoco’s growing operations. It moved from Xero to Oracle NetSuite in October 2023 to have greater functionality for a multi-entity organisation operating across multiple geographies, as well as developing processes across the finance function like automated internal controls.

Setting up sophisticated approvals

When Yoco completed the switch to NetSuite, it still needed a way to manage its complex approval workflows. Their approval matrix involved 32 different people across the business and typical conditions, such as vendor, dollar amount, and various cost centres. As Yoco has grown, so too has the complexity of its approval processes, particularly as it operates in a highly regulated industry.

Yoco already used ApprovalMax when they were using Xero, so they simply changed their integration in ApprovalMax once they switched to NetSuite. With ApprovalMax, the team at Yoco is always able to automate complex requestor and approval workflows that map directly to its sophisticated delegation matrix so incoming bills are always signed off by the right people, in the right order, before they're paid. It’s easy to add and change workflows as the business continues to expand in future.

“ApprovalMax empowers you to run things yourself. We don’t need to pay someone to set up the workflows for us – we can go in and fiddle with it ourselves. I trust it's going to work quickly and reliably to get a workflow up and running,” says Martin. 

Structure for growth

With ApprovalMax, Yoco easily manages the complex workflows it needs to add structure to the growing business. Some of the main benefits include:

Simple set up

With ApprovalMax, Yoco’s finance team can easily set up and make changes to automated approval workflows in a few steps.

Sophisticated multi-step workflows

Yoco manages the complex, multi-step workflows it needs as a highly regulated business using ApprovalMax, putting the right documents in the hands of the right people – without lifting a finger..

Visibility at scale

Yoco can see what is happening across different entities in multiple geographies from a single platform and connect directly into its ERP of choice, Oracle NetSuite.

On-the-go approvals

Using ApprovalMax’s Slack integration, Yoco’s team manages approvals from anywhere via the Slack app, without needing to log into ApprovalMax to review and approve documents.