Approve expenditures
Little of this can be handed to software today.
Software can assemble the case and recommend an answer, and that is genuinely useful. The decision stays with a person because someone has to be accountable for it. Treating the recommendation as the decision is how automation projects fail.
| How automatable | Barely automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Judgment, authorisation and strategy |
| Jobs that do it | 14 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Generalist agents, Models and routing |
| O*NET activity | Making Decisions and Solving Problems (4.A.2.b.1) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 14 occupations that perform it.
- Oversee expense allowances, ensuring that accounts are balanced at the end of each fiscal year.
- Prepare budgets and approve budget expenditures.
- Approve, reject, or coordinate the approval or rejection of lines of credit or commercial, real estate, or personal loans.
- Receive, record, and authorize requests for disbursements in accordance with company policies and procedures.
- Select or direct the execution of trades.
- Develop budgets or approve expenditures for supplies, materials, or human resources, ensuring that materials, labor, or equipment are used efficiently to meet production targets.
- Review, evaluate, and approve specifications for issuing and awarding bids.
- Recommend or authorize capital expenditures for acquisition of new equipment or property to increase efficiency and services.
- Determine allocations of funds for staff, supplies, materials, and equipment and authorize purchases.
- Review, recommend, or approve contracts or cost estimates.
- Prepare and administer budgets, approve and review expenditures, and prepare financial reports.
- Review, negotiate, or approve wind farm contracts.
- Evaluate and approve selection of vendors by studying past performance or new advertisements.
- Perform administrative functions, such as reviewing or writing reports, approving expenditures, enforcing rules, or purchasing of materials or services.
What we would actually use
One recommendation rather than a shortlist, because a shortlist is just your problem handed back. This is what we would buy for judgment, authorisation and strategy, and what it costs.
There is nothing here worth buying beyond a good assistant. Software assembles the case and recommends an answer, which any $20 assistant already does; the decision is yours, and no product on this page changes that.
Chosen for the cheapest thing that does the job, not the best funded. Nothing on this site is sponsored, and the full landscape is there when you want to disagree with us.
The rest of the category
Context, not alternatives to weigh up. We name the layer rather than promise a named product does your specific task.
Generalist agents
Matched from the kind of work, not from vendor marketing. Check any of them can reach the system your records actually live in — that connection, not the model, is where these projects stall.
How people actually do it
No workflow names this activity yet, but these automate the same kind of work, with the prompts to paste and what to keep for yourself.
Who does this work
14 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Aerospace Engineers
- Architectural and Engineering Managers
- Education Administrators, Kindergarten through Secondary
- Education and Childcare Administrators, Preschool and Daycare
- Financial Managers
- Industrial Production Managers
- Investment Fund Managers
- Legislators
- Natural Sciences Managers
- Purchasing Managers
- Sales Managers
- Transportation, Storage, and Distribution Managers
- Treasurers and Controllers
- Wind Energy Operations Managers
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Authorize business activities or transactions”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
| Activity | Jobs |
|---|---|
| Authorize financial actions | 5 |
| Authorize payments to settle legal disputes | 3 |
| Authorize construction activities | 1 |
Method. The activity, its taxonomy placement and the occupations that perform it come straight from the public-domain O*NET 30.3 database. The automatability band is ours: we map each of O*NET’s 41 generalized work activities to how much of its output current software can produce, assuming a person still reviews and owns the result. It is a coarse three-way judgment on purpose. A precise-looking percentage here would be invented.