With approval flows, you can adapt the expense approval process to your organisation's requirements. An approval flow can be as simple or as complex as you need. Any member of the organisation can be part of the approval process.
ℹ️ Team reviewers
Teams and team reviewers have been migrated to approval flows. If you have teams in your organisation which were set up with team reviewers, the system will have created approval flows based on those, so that the current workflow will remain largely the same as before. These approval flows can be edited or deleted as needed.
To get started with Approval Flows, go to Settings > Approval Flows. Users with the Administrator role can add, amend, add delete approval flows.
How does it work?
When an individual user creates and submits an expense of any type, that expense should then be reviewed. The outcomes of a review can be Approved, Rejected, or Changes Requested. In approval flows, the user who creates and submits the expense is called the “Requester”.
Once a user submits their expense, the system checks which approval flow they are associated to, and determines what should happen next with their expense. It could be that the expense is auto-approved, or that it needs to go through levels of review. There can be as many levels, or steps, as required – this will depend on the conditions set up within the approval flow.
To safeguard against potential delays in complex approval flows, certain users can override all steps – they will have an “Approve all steps” button. All users with the Administrator or Financial Reviewer role will be able to do this. (Users with these roles could also approve any expense before the introduction of approval flows.)
Setting up your approval flows
Default Approval Flow
When you open the Approval Flows page for the first time, you will find a flow named “Default Approval Flow” that is always at the top and cannot be deleted. This flow applies to all expenses where the user or team is not allocated as a Requester within any other approval flow.
Setting up a new approval flow
To set up an approval flow from scratch:
Go to Settings > Approval Flows and click the + Create Approval Flow button:
Give your approval flow a name.
Under Requesters, select the teams and/or users to whose expenses the approval flow should apply. Note the following:
You can only select a specific team or user for one approval flow.
If you select a user in one approval flow, and the team that the user belongs to in another, then the approval flow in which the user is specified individually will be applied.
Under Approval Flow Rules, set up all the steps and rules through which the expense will go. See more on this in the next section.
When you are done, click Save.
The system will shortly begin evaluating expenses and applying the appropriate approval flow.
Please note that it may take a few minutes before reviewers see expenses that they need to review according to your new flow. The same applies when you update an existing flow.
Approval Flow Rules
Auto-approval
Certain expenses may not need review by another user and can therefore bypass the approval process. You can choose from a list of conditions under which expenses will be approved automatically (“auto-approval conditions”).
To start with, you can choose one of two modes for the conditions to be evaluated:
When ALL auto-approval conditions are met, the approval steps are skipped:
This mode does exactly what it says: all of the conditions you specify must be true for the expense to be auto-approved.
When ONE OR MORE auto-approval conditions are met, the approval steps are skipped: An expense will be auto-approved if any of the conditions are met.
⚠️ Take care when choosing ONE OR MORE mode and setting the conditions.
If you choose, for example, the “Expense type is one of” condition and select the “Expense Claim” option, all expense claims will be auto-approved, no matter what the other conditions are.
The following auto-approval conditions are available:
Amount no more than | The expense amount is at or under this amount. |
Is not in policy breach | The expense conforms to all expense policy rules. |
Expense type is one of | You can specify one or more expense types. |
Tracking groups include | You can specify a tracking group and one or more permitted values |
Category and amount no more than | You can select a category and the maximum allowed amount for expenses of that category. Please see the note below. |
ℹ️ Category-and-Amount condition
With the ALL option you can set only one category-amount combination.
With the ONE OR MORE option, you can set multiple category-amount combinations.
An expense will be auto-approved if both of the following are true:
All line items of the expense match the specified category.
The total expense amount is at or below the amount specified.
Note that all fields for an auto-approval condition need to be completed before you can add another condition.
Steps
For expenses that fall outside auto-approval rules, you can apply multiple conditions and reviewers to your expense reviews. This is set up in the Steps section:
Steps are applied in the sequence set up and shown in the approval flow. Each step has the following elements:
Reviewers
Select the reviewers for this step. You can select any number of reviewers. The user(s) selected will see the expense in their Review list if the condition that follows applies.
Condition
Select from the following options:
Always | The selected reviewer(s) will always need to review the expense at this point in the flow. |
Amount at least | The expense amount is this amount or more. |
Amount no more than | The expense amount is this amount or less. |
Is in policy breach | The expense doesn't conform to all expense policy rules. |
Expense type is one of | You can specify one or more expense types. |
Tracking groups include | You can specify a tracking group and one or more permitted values. |
Fields (if applicable)
For the Amount at least and Amount no more than conditions, the amount is specified here.
Can Edit
The reviewer can edit the expense if needed. Under normal circumstances, only users with the Administrator or Financial Reviewer role can edit an expense. However, if this is selected, any user that is currently reviewing the expense will be able to edit it.
All must approve
If you selected multiple reviewers, all of them must approve the expense before it can move to the next step in the approval flow.
Fallback reviewer(s)
It may happen that an expense doesn’t meet any of the conditions specified under Steps. For example, if only an “Amount over” is specified, expenses below this amount won’t have any applicable steps. In these cases a “fallback” is needed, to ensure that the expense does get reviewed. You can select from the following:
Auto Approval – the expense will automatically be approved
Manual Approval – specify the user(s) that can approve the expense
Inbox tabs
To accommodate approval flows, the Inbox tabs are now labelled as follows:
My Open | Any of your own items, such as transactions, financial documents and expenses. |
Review | Expenses which require action from you, such as expenses for which you are a reviewer. |
In Progress | Expenses for which you will be in the approval flow, but which are not yet ready for you to review. |
All | Every expense you have permissions to see. |
The filters applicable to expenses have been moved out of a single drop-down and spread across the top of the inbox for ease of use.
Review History
When viewing an expense, you can click the Approval Flow tab to see where the expense currently finds itself in the approval flow.