If a Payhawk administrator at your company has enabled the Payhawk-Slack connection, you will see the Payhawk app in your company’s Slack workspace.
The Payhawk application, called Financial Controller Agent, can be found in your Apps section and appears as shown in the following image.
This integration allows Payhawk to send you smart reminders for missing expense documents, submit expenses directly within Slack, and approve or decline expenses if you're part of an approval workflow.
To fully utilize the Payhawk-Slack integration, you must authenticate, granting Slack access to your Payhawk data.
When you are on the go, you can use the Payhawk application from the Slack mobile app or use the Payhawk Mobile app.
Authenticating in Slack
Before you can use Slack to submit documents and expenses, you must first authenticate to grant Slack access to your expense data.
If your Slack and Payhawk emails match but you haven’t authenticated, you will still see the Payhawk app in Slack and receive smart reminders, but you won’t be able to take any actions, such as uploading expense documents or submitting expenses.
If your Slack and Payhawk emails don’t match or you have multiple Slack accounts, you will see the Payhawk app in Slack but won’t receive smart reminders or be able to take any actions until you authenticate.
As an employee, you can authenticate to Slack in the following way:
Go to Slack and select Financial Controller Agent. If the Payhawk app is not visible in the list, click on Add apps and search for Financial Controller Agent.
To start the authentication flow, enter the
/payhawk-login
Slack command. As a result, you'll get the following reply:On the next screen, click on Allow.
Alternatively, you will be prompted to authenticate to Slack by the Financial Controller Agent once you try to do your first action.
Submitting documents and expenses via Slack
As an employee, once you've made an expense, you'll receive a reminder in Slack to upload the expense document. The Agent will guide you through the required fields for submission and automatically suggest relevant information based on the document and transaction data.
It feels like chatting with ChatGPT to effortlessly submit your expenses to Payhawk:
Go to Slack and select the Payhawk app. Open the reminder you got in the Chat or History tab
Click on the Submit expense button or just drop the document in the chat.
Upload the expense document (if required for submission).
Select or add any required expense data such as expense category.
Once all of the required fields are collected and have values, the Agent will summarise the expense state
Confirm the submission to the Agent in any of the following ways:
Click on Confirm, Submit, or Okay.
React with an emoji.
Explain your confirmation as you wish.
Approving requests in Slack
As an approver included in the company workflow, you'll receive a smart reminder about a pending approval in Slack by Payhawk. You will be able to approve expenses, purchase orders, cards, and funds depending on the workflow you are part of.
To approve, decline, or comment on the request:
Go to Slack and select the Payhawk app.
Click on the respective action - in this case, Approve.
Updating the language preferences for Slack smart reminders
The change will only apply to new messages; previously sent smart reminders will remain in the original language.