ApproveThis manages your Prepear Integration approvals.

When Meal Plans Meet Approval Chains

Let’s get real: managing subscriptions for meal kits or food blogs shouldn’t require playing corporate telephone. Yet here we are – marketing teams waiting on finance to approve discount campaigns, customer success needing legal to vet gift subscriptions, and everyone stuck chasing down approvers via Slack. Enter ApproveThis and Prepear, connected through Zapier. It’s like giving your approval processes a sous chef – suddenly everything’s prepped, timed, and plated without the frantic kitchen chaos.

Why This Combo Works (Besides Saving Your Sanity)

Prepear handles the foodie stuff – subscription lifecycle events, abandoned carts, gift purchases. ApproveThis handles the adulting – routing decisions, enforcing rules, documenting who approved what. Together through Zapier, they automate the handoff between “something happened” and “someone needs to decide.”

The Nerdier Details

When Prepear flags an abandoned cart, Zapier tells ApproveThis to create an approval task. Marketing leads get an email (yes, they can approve directly from Outlook), check the cart details, and either trigger a recovery campaign or kill it. All without logging into Prepear. All without creating 12 new Slack threads. All while keeping CFOs happy because thresholds auto-approve discounts under $50.

Real Scenarios for Real Teams

1. Recovering Abandoned Carts (Without Begging)

What breaks: User adds a $200/year subscription, bails at checkout. Marketing wants to offer a 10% discount. Finance says “not above 15%.” Three days later, someone manually checks Prepear’s reports.

What works: Zapier detects the abandoned cart, ApproveThis:

• Routes to Marketing Director if discount ≤15%
• Escalates to CFO if higher
• Auto-approves if under $50 loss

Example: Paleo bloggers use this to recover 23% of abandoned carts by offering time-limited upgrades to annual plans – approved in 2 hours vs. 2 days.

2. Stopping Referral Fraud Before It Starts

What breaks: Free users sign up claiming a referral from “Chef John.” Your intern approves all, not realizing John’s account was deleted last month.

What works: Every free signup with a referral code triggers:

• Automatic check if referrer exists in Prepear
• Routing to Customer Success if valid
• Routing to Fraud team if invalid

Example: Vegan meal prep services cut fraudulent referral payouts by 81% by adding this gatekeeper step.

3. Retaining Canceled Subscriptions (Gracefully)

What breaks: User cancels after 11 months. Sales wants to offer a free month to keep them. But legal hasn’t approved the new retention offers doc.

What works: Cancel event → Approval flow with:

Pre-loaded CRM data (how long they stayed, what recipes they used) + pre-approved offer tiers. Customer success picks an offer, gets instant legal sign-off based on pre-built rules.

4. Scaling Gift Subscriptions (Without the Overtime)

What breaks: Holiday gift subscriptions spike. Accounting needs to verify tax docs for corporate purchases. Everyone’s emailing PDFs back and forth.

What works: Each gift purchase:

→ Checks if buyer is tax-exempt → If yes, routes to Accounting with attached certs → If no, auto-approves. Plus, sets reminder to re-verify certs every 12 months.

Setting This Up Without an IT Degree

Zapier’s the middleman here. You’ll:

1. Pick a Prepear trigger (new signup, canceled sub, etc.)
2. Select ApproveThis’s “Create Request” action
3. Map Prepear data to approval fields (Pro tip: use Calculated Fields to auto-add expiration dates for offers)

Total setup time: 15 minutes if you’re slow at typing. No coding. No consultants. Just drag, drop, and done.

Why Your Teams Will Actually Use This

For Marketing:

Launch flash sales without waiting for legal to review every discount. Set approval thresholds so anything under 20% off is auto-approved, but add a Calculated Field to cap total discounts at $5k/month.

For Customer Success:

Handle upgrade/downgrade requests in one place. Vacation Delegation means no approvals get stuck when Pam from Accounting is out paddleboarding.

For Finance:

Auto-escalate high-risk write-offs. Get audit trails for every decision without chasing down Slack histories.

For External Partners:

Guest bloggers can approve recipe submissions via email without getting Prepear logins. Influencers can approve branded meal kits without seeing your backend.

The Fine Print (That’s Actually Useful)

Approvers don’t need Prepear seats. Huge for agencies or external legal teams. They approve via email or ApproveThis’ portal. No added license costs.

Works with Prepear’s existing tiers. Doesn’t matter if you’re on Basic or Enterprise – Zapier plays nice with all.

Pause approvals during outages. If Prepear’s API is down, ApproveThis queues requests and syncs when back online.

Bottom Line: Fewer Meetings, More Meatballs

There’s a reason food brands using this combo report 60% faster approval cycles. It’s not magic – it’s just removing the crap that makes simple decisions feel like herding cats. When Prepear handles the foodies and ApproveThis handles the paperwork, teams actually get back to work.

Ready to stop being an approval janitor? Book a demo or grab a free trial. (Yes, you can approve your own signup.)