Signing Authority and Approvals

General orientation, not legal advice; arrangements differ by jurisdiction and by institution.

Putting the controls in “Signing Authority and Approvals” into practice requires ownership that survives absence and can be reviewed without relying on memory. Teams can use this practical resource to see how responsibility and working time are distributed around recurring tasks, while keeping credentials and sensitive records in authorised systems and limiting activity data to a proportionate operational purpose.

For an independent benchmark, compare the local approach with UK government director responsibilities guidance; the useful test is whether ownership, access and recovery remain proportionate and explainable when the usual expert is absent.

A single approver is a bottleneck that becomes a blockage the moment they are unavailable. Unlike most dependencies, fixing this involves third parties and their timescales.

Where it bites

Payments: nobody can release the run, and suppliers or staff go unpaid.

Contracts: a client is waiting for signature and nobody else can sign.

Purchase approvals above a threshold.

Regulatory submissions with a named responsible person.

And anything requiring a company officer, which a member of staff cannot substitute for.

The arrangements to put in place

A second bank signatory or approver, with the bank's own process followed properly.

Delegated authority up to a stated value, written down and communicated.

A named deputy for approvals, with the limits stated.

And for regulatory roles, whatever the regime requires — which sometimes cannot be delegated at all and needs a different answer.

Why it takes longer than expected

Banks require forms, identification and sometimes a board resolution.

Changes to mandates can take weeks.

Which means this cannot be arranged during the emergency it is needed for, and it is the single strongest argument for doing it now.

The threshold question

Set a value below which a second person can approve without the usual approver.

High enough to keep normal work moving, low enough that the exposure is acceptable.

Most small organisations can set this considerably higher than they instinctively do, because the cost of stopped work exceeds the risk of the amounts involved.

Sole traders and single directors

Genuinely harder: some authorities cannot be delegated where there is only one officer.

Options include appointing a second director, a power of attorney, or an arrangement with an accountant — each with consequences worth taking advice on.

The point is that this needs a deliberate decision rather than being left, because the default outcome on incapacity is that nothing can happen at all.

Recording what exists

Who can approve what, up to what value, and who their alternate is.

One page.

Most organisations discover when writing it that the arrangement everybody assumed exists was never actually set up with the bank.

Testing it

Have the deputy approve something real, once.

A mandate that exists on paper and has never been used frequently turns out to be incomplete — a form not returned, an identification step not finished.

Better discovered on an ordinary Tuesday.

What to check

Could payroll run next month without your main approver?

Is there a second bank signatory, and has it been used?

What is the delegated limit, and does anybody know it?

And if you are a single director, what happens if you are incapacitated?

The point

Bank mandate changes take weeks, which means this cannot be arranged during the emergency it is needed for..

Underlying all of this

Everything in this collection reduces to four habits: know where the dependence sits, do the cheap fixes first, use the absences that already happen as rehearsals, and decide deliberately about what remains. None of it requires a framework, a tool or a consultant, and an organisation that does those four things consistently is substantially harder to damage than one with a succession document nobody has read.

The recurring pattern

The recurring pattern across every section here is the same: dependence forms through sensible individual decisions, becomes invisible because it feels like reliability, and is addressed only after it has cost something. The work that prevents that is small, continuous and unglamorous, which is exactly why it gets deferred.