CapEx Request & Approval Tracker

The problem this kills

Someone wants to buy a $42,000 packaging line. The request shows up as an email with a quote attached, maybe a paragraph of justification, maybe not. Does this need the plant manager, the VP, or the CFO to sign off? Is there even budget left in the "Manufacturing Equipment" line, or did three other requests already eat it this quarter? What's the payback - did anyone actually do the math? And six weeks later, when the invoice comes in $5,000 over the approved amount, who decided that was fine?

Capital spending is exactly the kind of money that should be controlled tightly, and in most finance teams it's tracked in the loosest way possible: a request spreadsheet, a budget spreadsheet that doesn't talk to it, an approval that happened verbally or in a forwarded email, and a year-end scramble to reconcile what was committed against what was actually spent. Over-budget requests slip through because nobody can see the running total. Approvals happen out of order. And when the auditor asks for the CapEx register with sign-offs, you build it by hand.

This tool replaces that mess with one place where requests are submitted properly, checked against real remaining budget, routed to the right approvers by amount, committed only after sign-off, and tracked all the way to actual spend.

What you'll build

A small internal web app, just for your team, that:

• Lets teams submit a CapEx request with cost, category, justification, expected benefit, and useful life - and computes a simple payback so every request carries the same basic ROI math.
• Checks the request against the remaining budget in its category and flags anything that would blow the line.
• Routes each request through your tiered approval rules - department head, then VP, then CFO - based on the dollar amount.
• Blocks requests over remaining budget from being committed without an explicit escalation/override that's logged.
• Commits a request only after every required approver has signed off, then tracks committed vs. actual spend as invoices land.
• Dedupes on request ID so the same request can't be entered or committed twice.
• Exports a clean CapEx register and a remaining-budget report, plus a hand-off file of approved assets ready for your fixed-asset register.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single markdown file you paste into Claude Code (a free AI coding agent). It walks the agent through building the whole tool, step by step, each step ending with a ready-to-paste prompt.

The most important part: the plan opens by interviewing you about your business. Before it writes a single line, the agent asks how CapEx requests reach you today, what your budget categories and dollar thresholds actually are, the real field and code names in your data, your typical and peak request volumes, your exact approval and escalation rules, and your messiest edge cases (multi-year projects, leases vs. purchases, requests that span two budget lines, an approver who's out). It reads a short tailored spec back to you, you confirm it, and only then does it build - so you get a tool shaped to your capital process, not a generic template you have to bend to fit.

Inside you'll find:

• The discovery interview and how the agent turns your answers into the data model and approval tiers.
• The full build: database, login, the request form with payback math, the budget-availability check, the routing engine, the approval screens, the commit + actual-spend tracking, and the email flow.
• The hard human approval gate, the over-budget escalation block, and the committed-vs-actual reconciliation.
• Verification steps so you can prove it works, and the CSV-export fallback so it's fully usable even before you connect it to your ERP or fixed-asset system.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a toy. The plan builds in the controls a finance team actually needs:

• Login so only your team can see or touch anything.
• Row-level security so people only see the requests, budgets, and approvals that belong to your organization.
• A complete audit trail - every submission, budget check, approval, rejection, escalation, commit, and actual-spend update is logged with who and when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop gate - the AI checks budget, computes payback, and routes; but a real approver at each tier must review and approve, and nothing is ever committed automatically.
• Tiered sign-offs enforced in code - a request over its threshold physically cannot reach "committed" without every required approver.
• A budget block - a request that exceeds remaining budget can't be committed unless someone explicitly escalates, and that override is recorded.
• Duplicate guards so the same request ID can't be processed or committed twice.

Who it's for

Controllers, FP&A managers, plant and ops leaders, and BPM folks who own capital spending and the approvals around it - and who want a real, auditable CapEx tracker without buying a heavyweight planning suite or waiting on IT. You don't need to write code. You need your CapEx budget, your approval thresholds, and an afternoon-to-a-weekend.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.