You can build flexible custom workflows for your company by defining a specific approver role or assigning a given employee as an approver to your workflow and by setting specific conditions for the workflow to take place when these conditions are satisfied.
This way, you can create approval workflows for specific cases based on the following conditions:
Amount
Team of the employee submitting the request
Selected value of any custom field
Selected expense category
For more information on the roles and people you can include in your workflows, see the article about workflow approvers.
Amount-based workflow conditions
For the approval step of each request, you can use amount-based conditions and define thresholds. These thresholds can be approved by different employees or roles at your company individually, one after the other, or in parallel.
Previously, in Payhawk you could set the following amount-based approval workflows:
The previously known single-step, multi-step sequential, and multi-step non-sequential amount-based workflows have been built upon and extended to cover more complex scenarios.
Single-step approvals
You can enable employees to submit expense requests only to the most relevant person who has been defined as the approver for this amount (previously known as a single-step approval).
Let's assume you configure the following settings in Payhawk:
Amounts less than or equal to EUR 200 require approval from a Team manager.
Amounts greater than EUR 200 and less than or equal to EUR 500 require approval from the Development budget manager.
Amounts greater than EUR 500 require approval from any Payhawk administrator at the company.
Then, if an employee submits a Mileage expense request for:
EUR 150, only the Team manager will be required to approve the amount.
EUR 450, only the Development budget manager will be required to approve the amount.
EUR 550, only a Payhawk administrator will be required to approve the amount.
Multi-step sequential approvals
You can require all relevant approvers to approve expense requests for each threshold in sequence.
Let's assume you configure the following settings in Payhawk:
The Team manager has to approve all amounts.
Amounts greater than EUR 300 require approval from a Second level manager.
Amounts greater than EUR 500 require approval from any Payhawk administrator at the company.
Then, if an employee submits a Mileage expense request for EUR 350, the Team manager will first approve the amount. Next, the Second level manager will provide the final approval.
If an expense requires an update from a previous approver, subsequent approvers can return it to the submitter so that they can re-submit it and trigger the approval workflow from the beginning.
Multi-step non-sequential approvals
You can require all relevant approvers to approve expense requests simultaneously.
Let's assume you configure the following settings in Payhawk:
The Team manager approves all amounts.
Amounts greater than EUR 500 require approval from a Payhawk accountant at your company.
Amounts greater than EUR 1,000 require approval from any Payhawk administrator at the company.
Then, if an employee submits a Reimbursable expense request for EUR 1,200, the Team manager, the Payhawk accountants, and the Payhawk administrators will be notified about the submitted request and will have to approve the amount.
Defining custom workflows
Once you define your Custom field and Category managers, you can aggregate conditions, approvers, and amounts to define complex approval workflows.
Let's assume you want to set up the following workflow:
Approval by the Team manager is always required.
Approval by a Category manager is required for specific General Ledger (GL) categories above a certain threshold.
Approval by a Financial planning and analysis (FP&A) team manager is triggered based on a specific GL or amount.
Approval from Procurement team members is also triggered by a specific GL, product code, or amount.
Specific people, such as the CFO or CEO, must always approve requests for amounts over a defined threshold.
The implemented workflow will look like the following.
