Author: Dave Waller, Principal Product Manager at Anaplan.
As organizations grow, so does the volume of planning decisions. Re-forecasting headcount, adjusting regional sales promotional budgets, or approving operational expenses can quickly scale from a handful of decisions to hundreds or thousands of individual requests.
When your planning tools force you to review and approve these items one by one, your momentum slows. Planners spend hours submitting individual lines, managers find their inboxes flooded with notification emails, and leaders waste valuable time toggling back and forth between different software pages just to make simple decisions.
We are thrilled to announce that batch approvals are now active for all Anaplan Workflow Advanced customers. This update is designed to remove the friction from your planning cycles, eliminate administrative bottlenecks, and restore focus to your team.
The costly bottleneck of micro-approvals
Think about your last major planning cycle. Did your managers receive fifty separate email alerts in a single afternoon because their team submitted fifty minor budget adjustments? Did your executive team have to open fifty different pages to click "approve" fifty times?
This micro-transaction approach creates intense notification fatigue and leads to critical delays. When the overhead of approving a decision is too high, reviews get pushed to the end of the week — or the end of the month.
Batch approvals solve this problem by turning high-volume micro-tasks into a fast, consolidated, single-click process.
Empowering planners with batch submission
Planners should focus on the quality of their numbers, not the repetitive clicking of submission buttons.
With batch submission, your team no longer has to click through items line-by-line. Once they have finalized their plans, a single click of a "submit batch" button on their dashboard automatically packages all prepared items and routes them into their respective approval flows. It is fast, automated, and scales effortlessly.
Protecting executive focus with daily digests
We believe your inbox should be a tool for focus, not a source of stress. Batch notifications completely shield approvers from real-time alert fatigue.
Instead of receiving constant, disruptive email alerts throughout the day, managers and executives now receive a single, consolidated email digest. Sent once a day at midnight UK time, this digest summarizes all pending approvals waiting for their review, ensuring they can plan their day and address actions in a structured, focused window.
Driving rapid decisions with dedicated approval panes
When it is time to take action, the new, dedicated batch approval user experience makes decision-making incredibly fast.
Clicking View approvals in your daily email digest opens a side-by-side preview panel directly within Anaplan. From this single screen, you can:
- See the big picture: Quickly preview the context and key data of each request in the sidebar without leaving your page.
- Filter and select: Use checkboxes to select specific lines, or select them all at once.
- Act with a single click: Click Approve or Reject to process all selected items simultaneously.
Ready to scale your workflows?
Planning cycles do not have to feel like administrative hurdles. By grouping high-volume tasks into consolidated, single-click actions, batch approvals let your organization focus on what truly matters: making smart, timely decisions that drive the business forward.
Speak to your Anaplan page builder today to configure batch approvals, and experience a faster, cleaner planning cycle.
Questions? Leave a comment!
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Also by Dave: Configuring batch approvals: a step-by-step guide for Workflow administrators
