Every growing company hits the same wall: approvals live in email threads, WhatsApp messages and one manager's memory. ERPNext ships a native Workflow engine and Workflow Action queue, which is solid for a linear draft-to-approved state machine — but it runs out of road fast. There is no visual BPMN canvas to model a real process, no first-class delegation or out-of-office routing, no SLA timer that escalates a stuck Purchase Order after two days, and conditional branching beyond a simple condition expression means hand-writing server scripts per DocType. Finance ends up chasing signatures and nobody can prove who approved what, when.

We build a proper Frappe app — ecosire_approvals — that layers a visual process engine on top of ERPNext instead of fighting the native one. At its core are a handful of custom DocTypes: an Approval Process (the BPMN definition, stored as a versioned JSON graph of tasks, gateways and sequence flows), Approval Step and Approval Instance (the live run tied to a source document via reference_doctype + reference_name), a Delegation Rule, and an Escalation Policy. A drag-draw BPMN designer built with bpmn-js renders in a Frappe Page/Workspace; you draw the flow, bind each task to a role or role profile, and set gateway conditions using safe evaluated expressions against the source doc's fields. On the backend, hooks.py doc events (on_submit, on_update_after_submit, validate) instantiate an approval run, and whitelisted methods (frappe.whitelist()) handle approve/reject/reassign actions from the desk, the mobile app or the Frappe REST API. Multi-level and parallel approvals are modeled as sequential or parallel gateways; conditional routing evaluates document fields (amount thresholds, cost center, department) to pick a branch.

SLA and escalation are driven by Frappe's scheduler. A scheduler_events hook runs periodically, compares each open Approval Instance against its Escalation Policy (elapsed time vs. threshold, business-hours aware), and auto-escalates: reassign to the delegate, notify the next level, or breach-flag the step. Delegation and out-of-office rules mean an approver going on leave routes their queue to a backup for a date range without changing the process definition. Approvers act where they already are — a desk notification, an email with approve/reject action links (signed, single-use tokens), a WhatsApp message via your provider, or the ERPNext mobile app. Every action writes an immutable audit trail (who, when, from which channel, with comments), and role-and-permission integration ensures a user only sees and acts on steps their role profile allows. It is built and tested for Frappe/ERPNext v15 and forward-compatible with v16.

Because this is build-to-order, nothing ships until we agree on your exact processes. We start with a scoping call to map the DocTypes, roles and approval matrices you actually run, then build against your requirements on a staging bench, validate through UAT, and hand you installable source, docs and a git repo. Typical delivery is 2 to 4 weeks from confirmed scope depending on how many processes and channels you need. You own the code, and we back it with a post-go-live support window.