Approvals shouldn't disappear into someone's inbox.
Zevolo turns purchase, spend and change approvals into a tracked route with owners, deadlines and an audit trail you can produce later.
- Who it's for
- Finance, projects and operations leadership
- What you should see
- Every approval has a named owner, a timestamp and a reason.
All access managed securely via your Nightingale Admin Centre.
Does any of this sound familiar?
These are the situations Zevolo was built to remove.
Requests stall with no owner
An approval sits unanswered for a week because nobody knows whose turn it is.
Spend is committed before it's approved
Work starts on a verbal yes, and finance finds out when the invoice lands.
No record of who decided what
Six months later nobody can say who signed off, on what basis, or when.
Thresholds are applied inconsistently
The same value gets one signature in one team and three in another.
Chasing is a full-time job
Someone spends their week nudging approvers rather than doing their actual role.
How Zevolo fixes it.
Three steps. No implementation project required.
- 1
Define the route
Set who approves what, at which value, in which part of the business.
- 2
Requests route themselves
Submissions land with the right approver, escalate when they go stale, and record every decision.
- 3
Report on the decisions
See cycle times, bottlenecks and spend committed against approvals, by team.
What you get out of it.
Five things a business owner cares about, and what each one looks like in practice.
Decisions move
Automatic routing and escalation take the chasing out of the process.
Spend controlled before it's committed
Approval happens ahead of the order, not after the invoice.
No unauthorised commitments
Thresholds are applied the same way every time, in every team.
See where things stick
Cycle time by stage and approver shows exactly where the delay is.
An audit trail by default
Every request keeps its decision history, attachments and reasoning.
Results customers get with this product.
- Structured approval flows route every request to the right approver, in the right order, automatically
- Live budget variance alerts and PO discipline stop spend leakage before it lands on a board pack
- Immutable audit trail of who requested, who approved and when — ready when auditors ask
Everything in Zevolo, grouped by how you'll use it.
18 capabilities across booking, team experience, intelligence and operations — with more shipping every release.
- Approval Flows
Structured routing for every decision. Requests reach the right approver, in the right order, automatically.
- Accountability
Every action is attributable. A full audit trail of who requested, who approved, and when.
- Transparency
Live status on projects, tasks and pending approvals. Nothing waits in someone's inbox unseen.
- Speed
Cut decision latency. Approvers act in one click, work unblocks, execution keeps pace.
A look at Zevolo.
The dashboard your team will use day to day.
What's your approval cycle costing you?
Every stuck approval quietly costs project margin. See what the recovered decision time is worth against Zevolo's per-user pricing.
- Gross saving / yr
- £65,800
- Subscription / mo
- £49
- Payback
- 1 mo
- ROI multiple
- 111.9×
Indicative only. Real savings depend on your operation and current baseline. Pricing shown reflects the Pro tier at your inputs.
Starter is free, forever.
Sensible limits on the free tier so you can prove value before you spend a penny.
Starter — no credit card, no auto-billing, cancel anytime.
Manual workflows for individuals and small teams.
- Unlimited projects (limited active) & tasks
- Manual approval requests
- Basic budget vs actual
- Team of up to 5 users
Full automation for growing operations teams.
- Per-user + per-approver billing
- Automated approval workflows
- Portfolio dashboards & Gantt
- Time tracking & timesheets
- Integrations & API
Multi-site, regulated and high-volume environments.
- Everything in Pro
- AI portfolio analytics & risk scoring
- Audit-grade compliance & change control
- SSO / SAML & advanced roles
- Custom SLA & DPA
Save up to 30% when combining 3+ apps · 2 months free with annual billing
Implementation
One to two weeks to map existing approval routes. You set your workspace up yourself; Enterprise customers get an assisted import and a named contact.
Billing
Monthly, in advance, by card. Prices are in GBP and shown excluding VAT. Changing plan mid-month is prorated automatically.
Cancellation
Monthly rolling — cancel any time from your account and you keep access to the end of the period you have paid for. You can export your data before you go.
Feature comparison.
Starter unlocks ~30% of the ROI tools (manual). Pro adds another ~40% (with automation). Enterprise unlocks the remaining 30% with full power.
Compare all featuresacross Starter, Pro & Enterprise+
| Capability | Starter | Pro | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|
| Projects | Limited active | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Users | Up to 5 | Unlimited (per-user) | Unlimited |
| Tasks, statuses & owners | |||
| Manual approval requests | |||
| Automated approval workflows | |||
| Time tracking & timesheets | |||
| Portfolio dashboards & Gantt | |||
| Integrations & API | |||
| AI portfolio analytics & risk scoring | |||
| Audit-grade change control | |||
| SSO / SAML & advanced roles | |||
| Custom SLA & DPA |
Why Zevolo exists.
Governance in most operations teams runs on inbox chains. Approvals sit unread, budgets are checked after the fact, and projects miss stage gates because there is no shared record of what was agreed by whom.
This is not a discipline problem — it is a tooling problem. Generic project tools give you tasks; ERP systems give you numbers; neither gives you an auditable trail of decisions across projects, approvals and budgets.
What it costs to leave this unsolved.
Qualitative framing based on what operations teams routinely tell us — not a promise of specific savings.
Decisions that should take days take weeks; supplier onboarding, project starts and hiring pipelines all slow to the pace of the slowest inbox.
Without live budget vs commitment visibility, overruns are only visible in the next monthly report.
Projects skip governance steps that were nominally required, and the audit trail cannot be reconstructed after the fact.
What Zevolo does about it.
Zevolo brings projects, approvals and budgets into a single governance workspace. Every approval has a named approver, a deadline and an audit trail. Every project has a live budget vs committed vs actual view. Every stage gate has a checklist that must be satisfied before the project can advance.
It is deliberately opinionated: standard approval matrices, standard budget structures, standard stage-gate templates — configurable, but with sensible defaults so teams get value from day one.
Every capability, grouped by workflow.
Approvals
- Configurable approval matrix
Rules by amount, category, cost centre and originator.
- Delegation & out-of-office
Approvals never stall because someone is on leave.
- Full audit trail
Who approved what, when, and against which policy version.
Projects
- Stage gates with checklists
Advance only when the required evidence is attached.
- RACI on every task
No ambiguous ownership at any point in the project.
- Cross-project dependencies
See the domino effect when a slip on one project reshapes another.
Budgets
- Budget vs committed vs actual
Live position — not a monthly snapshot.
- Purchase-order linkage
POs raised through Zevolo commit against the right budget line automatically.
- Multi-year budgets
Rolls forward year on year with variance analysis.
How Zevolo runs a decision
- 1
Request raised
Structured form matched to policy — no free-text approvals.
- 2
Matrix routes it
Approvers assigned automatically by amount, category and cost centre.
- 3
Approvers decide with context
Full budget position and prior related approvals visible inline.
- 4
Commitment posted
Approval creates the PO commitment against the correct budget line.
- 5
Audit trail closed
Immutable record retained per your document retention policy.
Practical outcomes teams report.
- Approval cycle time typically shortens materially in the first month once approvals stop living in email.
- Budget overruns are visible in the week they happen, not the month afterwards.
- External auditors get the evidence they need without a two-week scramble.
Common use cases.
Where every approval must be reproducible in an audit context.
Local autonomy within centrally-set guardrails.
Where every project needs a stage-gate discipline that generic PM tools cannot enforce.
Fits your stack.
Approved POs export cleanly to the major UK accounting packages.
Enterprise identity providers on the Enterprise tier.
Shared identity, shared audit log with every other Nightingale product.
How your data is protected.
Row-level segregation per workspace and per cost centre; approval history is immutable.
ICO registered, hosted in the UK, encryption in transit and at rest, and full audit log retention.
Related reading & templates.
How to design approval chains that catch the right risk without bottlenecking every decision — with rules of thumb by spend band and project type.
Read the articleWhat to change in your expense policy now that teams are hybrid — mileage, home office, software subs, working-from-anywhere and per diems.
Read the articleHow to keep small and mid-sized projects on budget using simple committed-vs-actual tracking and weekly burn reviews.
Read the articleIs Zevolo the right fit?
- Who it's for
- Organisations with delegated authority rules and multi-step sign-off
- Typical user
- Finance controller, project office, operations manager
- Typical size
- 50 to 2,000 employees
- Time to get running
- One to two weeks to map existing approval routes
- What people use instead
- Email chains, shared spreadsheets, approval modules bolted onto finance systems
- Why Zevolo
- Approval rules you can change yourself, without a consultant, and an audit trail that stands up in a finance review.
We'd rather show you real ones.
Zevolo is a young product and we won't publish quotes we haven't earned. Customer stories will appear here as early customers agree to be named — with their own words and their own numbers, not ours. Until then, the free tier is the honest way to judge it: run it on real work for a fortnight and see what changes.
Happy to be an early reference customer? Tell us on the contact form and we'll talk about what that looks like.
Zevolo questions, answered.
Everything you need to know about Starter, scaling up, and optional onboarding.
What's included in the free Starter tier?+
Starter is free forever and gives you the project dashboard with status & owners, tasks with assignees and due dates, manual approval requests, budget vs actual on a limited number of projects, and basic reports. Enough to run projects & tasks for one team before turning on automation.
How does Pro pricing work?+
Pro is £49 per month for the whole workspace — unlimited standard users and approvers, no seat maths. Pro unlocks automated approval reminders & escalation, the approval bottleneck detector, budget variance alerts, purchase requests & PO workflow, project templates and automated reports. No minimum commitment.
When do I need Enterprise?+
Enterprise is for organisations that need AI approval cycle-time analytics, portfolio risk flagging, workflow optimisation suggestions, a portfolio governance dashboard and audit-grade compliance reporting. Custom priced against your seat count and governance requirements.
How do I upgrade from Starter to Pro?+
Sign up free and upgrade your whole workspace to Pro from Settings once you're signed in — you keep every project, task, approval and audit-trail entry.
Is there an onboarding fee?+
No fee on Starter or Pro — you can self-serve in minutes. Enterprise rollouts include an optional implementation package covering policy configuration, portfolio setup and training.
Does it work alongside the rest of the Nightingale stack?+
Yes. Zevolo sits alongside Rampify, Rekuver, WasteVault and the wider Nightingale stack under one account and one consistent experience — turn each module on only when it earns its place.
Guides & templates for this product.
Free, commercial-use-friendly reading and downloads. No signup required.
Designing approval workflows that don't slow your team down
How to design approval chains that catch the right risk without bottlenecking every decision — with rules of thumb by spend band and project type.
Modernising your expense policy for hybrid teams
What to change in your expense policy now that teams are hybrid — mileage, home office, software subs, working-from-anywhere and per diems.
Project budget discipline without project pain
How to keep small and mid-sized projects on budget using simple committed-vs-actual tracking and weekly burn reviews.
Hybrid Expense Policy Template
A modern, one-page expense policy template for UK SMEs running hybrid teams. Markdown — paste into your HR handbook.
HMRC Mileage Log
HMRC-compliant business mileage log for employees and self-employed claimants. CSV format.
Approval Authority Matrix
Template authority matrix mapping spend bands and project types to approver chains. CSV format.
- UK & EU hosting
- Encrypted in transit and at rest
- Multi-tenant isolation
- Role-based access
- Audit trails
- Daily backups
Security, hosting, backups and data protection explained in plain English — read our Trust & Security overview →
Zevolo runs on the Nightingale platform — one Admin Centre account, shared identity, billing and data across every app you add.
How the platform works