Introduction One of the most common problems I saw while building VMMS was this: documents get created, emailed to the next department, sit in someone's inbox for days, and when management asks "where's that voucher?" — nobody knows. In this article I'll walk you through how I built a flexible multi-department approval workflow in Laravel that solves exactly this problem. The Core Concept Instead of hardcoding approval steps, I built a pipeline where each document has a current stage, and the next stage is determined by a department configuration stored in the database — not in the code. This means you can add, remove, or reorder departments without touching a single line of PHP.…