Understand Advanced Approvals

Advanced Approvals give your company more control over which expenses require review, who reviews them and the order in which reviews happen. Advanced approvals is available for customers on Scale, Lead and Enterprise plans.

This article applies to companies that are using Advanced Approvals. If your company still configures Team, Tag or Company reviews separately, see the guidance for the existing Review settings instead.

What is the difference between Review and Advanced Approvals?

• Review is the action a reviewer takes on an expense. A reviewer can approve it, request more details or decline it.
• Advanced Approvals determine which expenses require review, who reviews them and the order in which those reviews happen.

For example, your company could create a policy in which an expense over €5,000 is reviewed first by the employee’s manager and then by Finance.

How Approval Policies work

An approval policy contains conditions and approval steps.

Conditions

Conditions determine which expenses enter the workflow. Depending on the available options, conditions can be based on information such as the expense amount, expense type, employee, team, entity, tag, project, department or cost centre.

Approval steps

Approval steps determine who reviews an expense.

A policy can contain one or more steps, such as:

1. Employee’s manager
2. Budget or project owner
3. Finance

Sequential and parallel approvals

• Sequential: One approval step must be completed before the next begins. Use this when reviewers need to act in a defined order
• Parallel: Two or more approval steps can be active at the same time. Use this when the reviews are independent

What reviewers can do

When an expense is assigned to a reviewer, it appears in Review.

The reviewer can:

• Approve the expense
• Request more details from the spender
• Decline the expense

After a reviewer approves an expense, it moves to the next required step. The workflow is complete when all required approval steps are complete. Learn more about review.

Switching to Advanced Approvals

When a company opts in to Advanced Approvals, the new approval policies replace the company’s existing Team, Tag, Company and Sequential Review logic. Before switching, check the workflows created from the existing setup and confirm their conditions, reviewers and step order.

Next steps

• To configure a policy, see Create & manage approval policies
• To provide absence coverage, see Add backup reviewers