When payables teams measure where their elapsed time goes, the answer is nearly always an approver who was not at a desk when the invoice arrived. Cloud delivery addresses that directly and unglamorously: the approval surface follows the person rather than the person having to reach a particular machine. Everything else about cloud delivery is secondary to that one effect.
The delay it removes
Site managers, engineers, partners and directors are frequently away from a desk, and they are frequently the approvers. An approval that can happen in a browser on a phone between other commitments turns days of waiting into minutes of attention. No change to policy is needed, which is why this benefit arrives quickly and reliably.
The risk it introduces
Convenience encourages approving from a summary. If the screen shows a supplier and a total with no route to the invoice itself, approvals become faster and less meaningful. Insist that the document and the match result are visible at the point of decision, on whatever device, and the benefit survives without the control eroding.
What you have to decide deliberately
Access control, because a shared cloud record makes visibility a configuration rather than a physical fact. Who can see supplier bank details, who can see values above a level, and who can approve on somebody's behalf. These questions had implicit answers when the record was a folder in an office, and they need explicit ones now.
Questions people ask about cloud based invoice approval
Is this less secure than an on-premises system?
Different rather than worse for most small finance teams, since a specialist provider generally patches and backs up more diligently. The risks that actually bite are access control and payment fraud, which are yours either way.
What if the internet is down?
Approvals wait, as they would if a server were down. For most organisations this is a smaller risk than an approver being unreachable, which happens far more often.
Can we get our data out?
Ask before buying, and ask specifically whether the export includes the original documents and the approval history rather than only the field data.