Discount Approval Router: Stop Approving Discounts in Email and Slack
A logged-in workflow that routes every discount request to the right approver by size and role, captures approve/deny with a reason, escalates and re-routes on denial, applies the approved discount to the quote/order, and logs who approved what — so nothing gets discounted off the cuff and nothing gets lost.
A logged-in tool where a rep submits a discount request on a quote/order line, the tool routes it to the correct approval tier by size and role, the approver approves or denies with a required note, denials can re-route or escalate, the approved discount is applied to the quote/order, and every decision is captured in an immutable audit trail you can export.
Before you start
- A Supabase account (free)
- A Vercel account (free)
- A Resend account (free)
- Your discount approval-threshold matrix (by %, $, and role)
- A sample of your quote/order lines (CSV or Google Sheet is fine)
- Claude Code or any AI coding agent
The problem this kills
Discount requests are where margin quietly leaks. A rep wants to shave 12% to close a deal. They ping their manager on Slack. The manager is in a meeting, so they email finance. Finance asks "what's the margin?" The thread forks. Two days later the rep, tired of waiting, just sends the quote with the discount and tells themselves they'll "get sign-off after." Nobody can later say who approved it, or whether anyone did.
Multiply that by every rep and every quarter-end push and you get a pile of discounts with no paper trail, no consistency, and no way to know if your own approval rules — the ones that say a manager can sign off 10% but finance must approve anything past 20% — are actually being followed. When the auditor or the new CFO asks "who approved this 30% discount?", the honest answer is a shrug and a search through three inboxes.
The fix isn't another policy PDF nobody reads. It's a workflow that makes the right path the easy path: the rep requests, the system routes it to exactly the person whose authority covers that size, that person approves or denies with a reason, and only then does the discount get applied — with a permanent record of the whole thing.
What you'll build
A simple internal web app for your sales and finance teams. A rep opens a quote or order line, enters the discount they want (as a % or a $ amount), and submits a request with a short justification. The tool reads your approval-threshold matrix — your real rules, by discount size and by role — and routes the request to the correct approval tier automatically. The right approver gets notified, opens the request, sees the deal context and the margin impact, and approves or denies with a required note.
If they approve, the discount is applied to the quote/order line and the request is closed. If they deny, the request can be re-routed (back to the rep to revise, or up to the next tier as an escalation) instead of dying in someone's inbox. Big discounts can require multiple tiers in sequence — manager first, then finance — and the tool walks the chain. Every step — submitted, routed, approved, denied, escalated, applied — is stamped with who, what, and when, and the whole decision log exports to CSV.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — how discount requests happen today, what your real approval thresholds are (the exact %, $, and role tiers), how your quotes and order lines are identified and named, what "margin" means in your data, who escalations go to, and the messy exceptions (bundle discounts, stacked promos, customer-specific contract pricing, expired quotes). It reads a short tailored spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before it builds anything — so the router enforces your policy, not a generic template.
From there it walks the agent through the data model, the request form, the routing engine that reads your matrix, the approve/deny gate with required notes, multi-tier escalation and re-routing on denial, applying the approved discount to the quote/order, and the audit log. Every step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's a full "No API yet?" path that imports your threshold matrix and your quote/order lines from a Google Sheet or CSV and exports a clean decision log — so you can build and run the whole thing this weekend, with no integration to your CRM or ERP required.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
Discount authority is exactly the kind of thing that needs real controls, so they aren't optional here. The plan builds in login so only your team can use the tool, row-level security so each org sees only its own quotes and requests, a complete audit trail of who requested, who routed, and who approved or denied (with the reason), a hard human-approval gate so a discount is never applied to a quote/order until the correct-tier approver signs off — the rep drafts the request, a person decides, and only then is it committed — and duplicate guards keyed on the quote/order ID + line + request ID so the same discount can't be approved or applied twice.
Who it's for
Sales reps who are tired of chasing approvals, sales managers who want consistent sign-off without living in Slack, and finance teams who need a clean record of every margin concession. If you can describe your discount approval rules — who can approve what size — you can build this.
You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, and answer the interview. You'll have requests routing to the right approver before the weekend's out.