Why owner approvals become a bottleneck

In many Taiwanese SMEs we visit, the owner can approve a credit note in thirty seconds — but only if they are on site. When they travel to suppliers or attend trade fairs, refunds stall, trucks wait, and staff improvise.

That is not a trust problem. It is a missing threshold table.

Three signs

First, staff use phrases like “wait until boss is back” for decisions that happen weekly. Second, the same approval types appear in different channels — LINE messages, paper slips, verbal OK across a noisy shop. Third, new hires learn approval rules from whoever trained them, not from a posted list.

What to document before any system change

Write down the last twenty exceptions the owner handled: customer credits, price overrides, overtime authorisations, petty cash top-ups. For each, note amount, department, and how long it waited.

You will usually find that 80% fit into four or five categories. Those categories become your delegation candidates.

A practical first step

Pick one category with a clear monetary cap — for example credits under NT$2,000. Define who can approve, what evidence they need (photo of returned goods, original invoice copy), and where they log it. Run it for 30 days with the owner reviewing the log weekly, not each case.

If the log stays boring, raise the cap or add the next category. If it gets exciting, you have found a training gap, not a reason to recentralise everything.

Owner approvals feel personal because they often are. Documenting them respects that relationship while giving the business room to breathe.