Janis Tirtey
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[ Workflow pattern ] Refund Approval

From refund approval with three handoffs to one-click decision.

Refund under 50 EUR today needs mail to finance, Stripe check, reply to support. 18 minutes per refund, 500 refunds per month. That is 150 hours of approval theater. A Slack pattern scan shows 47 occurrences of approve refund per week. Quick win with score 14 of 15.

· Quadrant: Quick Win· Trust ladder: L3 to L4· Score: 14 of 15
Pain

Four lanes, six boxes, three handoffs.

Customer writes a refund request. Support triages, mails finance. Finance checks Stripe, runs the refund, replies to support. Support replies to the customer. Three handoffs, 18 minutes cycle time, 9,000 EUR personnel cost per year for a sub-50-EUR reversible action.

Discovery

Slack pattern, approve refund 47x per week.

Slack pattern scan of the finance channel shows approve refund 47 times per week. Re-keying between support tool, Stripe dashboard and email. Wait time on a finance slot. Bottleneck markers.

H · HandoffR · Re-keyingW · Wait time
Solution

Rita agent with policy check and Stripe API.

Rita checks policy, risk score, Stripe status. Refunds under 50 EUR with risk OK flow autonomous through the Stripe API, reply to customer from template. Edge cases (over 50 EUR, risk flag, contract dispute) go with one-click approve to finance. Trust ladder level three at start, after eight weeks of eval level four for under 50 EUR plus risk OK.

Before / After

Refund approval workflow

Metric
IS · 4 lanes / 6 boxes
TARGET · 2 lanes / 3 boxes
Lanes
4
2
Boxes
6
3
Handoffs
3
0
Cycle time
18 min
30 sec
Cost / year
9,000 EUR
800 EUR
LeverAgent + one-click approve for edge cases. 91 percent cost removed, cycle time 36x faster.

Which approval flow runs at your place 47 times per week?

In the audit we scan your approval channels in Slack and mail. By day five you see which approvals show a refund-approval pattern and which one reaches score 14.

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