Optimise review settings to prevent bottlenecks

Optimising your review setup ensures expenses and invoices move quickly through approvals, giving your finance team real-time visibility. By distributing workloads and setting clear ownership, you can eliminate approval delays during busy periods or team holidays.

Distribute approvals by review type

Choosing the right routing method ensures reviews automatically head to the correct owner without manual intervention from admins.

Team review

• How it prevents bottlenecks: Automatically distributes approvals to managers so finance team doesn't have to process every transaction.
• Best practice:
  • Add multiple team reviewers for larger departments to ensure coverage during leave.
  • Use thresholds to bypass reviews for low-risk, low-value items.
  • Keep team membership updated—wrong teams lead to wrong reviewer routing.

Company review

• How it prevents bottlenecks: Works best as a secondary exception layer rather than a "finance reviews everything" catch-all.
• Best practice:
  • Raise the monetary thresholds so company review only captures high-value or high-risk items, leaving everyday spend to team managers.
  • Make sure there’s enough coverage during month-end and holidays.

Tag review (Advanced & Beyond plans)

• How it prevents bottlenecks: Automatically routes approvals to specific project or department owners based on the tags selected by employees, eliminating manual sorting by admins.

Sequential reviews (Advanced & Beyond plans)

• How it prevents bottlenecks: Sets a predictable chain of command where finance only receives an item after the necessary contextual manager checks are complete, reducing back-and-forth communication.

Good to know: To see step-by-step instructions on adjusting these settings in the app, read our guide on Configure team, tag, and company reviews. To see how items move visually through your system, check our Understand review and approval flow page.

Maintain a fast approval workflow

1. Limit the use of "Needs details"
   • Only send an item back to an employee when absolutely necessary, as this creates a looping delay.
2. Fix repeating issues at the source
   • If an expense constantly flags the same issue, ask an admin to update the configuration rules rather than adjusting the expense case-by-case.
3. Keep team memberships updated
   • Regularly audit your team lists in Pleo to ensure employees aren't assigned to outdated teams, which causes incorrect reviewer routing.

Fix stuck approvals and bottlenecks

Everything is waiting on a single reviewer

Check your company review thresholds—they may be set too low, dragging too many everyday expenses into the finance queue. Alternatively, check if a team review relies on one manager and add a secondary reviewer for backup coverage.

Reviews are paused during a reviewer's absence

Pleo Admins can manually override stuck reviews to keep data moving. Go to the Expenses or Export tabs to review and approve the pending items directly.