Create & manage Approval Policies

Create Approval Policies to control which expenses require review, who reviews them and the order in which approvals happen.

This article applies to companies using Approval Policies. If your company still configures Team, Tag or Company reviews separately, follow the guidance for the existing Review settings.

Before you begin

• Your company must be on a Scale, Lead or Enterprise plan
• You need admin permissions to create or edit approval policies
• Confirm that your company has switched to Advanced Approvals
• Decide which expenses the policy should cover and who should review them
• Make sure relevant teams, managers, tags and organisational information are up to date

Create approval policies 

1. Go to Settings.
2. Open Approval policies.
3. Select New review rule and enter a name that explains the policy’s purpose, such as Marketing expenses over €1,000.
4. Under Applies to, choose the company, entity or scope to which the policy applies.
5. Select the type of spend (cards, invoices, mileage etc) the rule watches for.
6. Add which conditions an expense must meet. Depending on the options available to your company, you may be able to use:
   • Expense amount or type
   • Employee, team or manager
   • Company or entity
   • Tag, project, department or cost centre
7. Add one or more approval steps and assign a reviewer or reviewers for each step.
   • Choose sequential steps when reviewers must act in a defined order. 
   • Choose parallel steps when reviews are independent and can happen at the same time.
   • Add backup reviewers where needed (recommended).
8. Review the setup and select Add to approval policy.

Edit approval policies

1. Open Approval policies.
2. Select the workflow you want to change.
3. Update its conditions, steps or reviewers.
4. Check whether the change affects pending expenses, new expenses or both.
5. Save or activate the updated workflow.

Deactivate or delete approval policies

Deactivate a policy when it should stop assigning new reviews but its configuration may still be needed. Delete a workflow only when it is no longer required and you understand what will happen to pending expenses.