Workflow approvers

You can build complex, robust, and flexible workflows that cover all use cases at your company by setting specific conditions and defining roles, role extensions, or specific employees as part of the approval workflow.

In Payhawk, you can include the following roles, role extensions, or users in the approval process:

Each workflow process contains one or more approval steps. Each approval step can contain one or more approvals, each with its own separate conditions. If the approval condition is met, an approval is necessary. When the approval includes multiple approvers, then any of them can approve.

For example, for amounts over EUR 1,000 coming from the Engineering team, you can assign specific people and also all Payhawk Administrators at your company as approvers. As a result, whenever an employee from Engineering submits a request for more than EUR 1,000, any of the defined approvers can approve it.

If you want each of these specific people and Payhawk roles or role extensions to approve, you need to create separate approval steps.

For example, for amounts over EUR 1,000 coming from the Sales team under the Travel category, you need to define separate approval steps, each containing the same conditions and the desired approver.

At each step and for each workflow, you will be able to include employees who have been assigned a default Payhawk role (Accountant, Administrator, IT Administrator, Senior AP Specialist, or Auditor) or the Team Manager role extension.

Once you include a role or a role extension in an approval workflow, any of the employees who have been assigned that role or role extension will be able to approve once the workflow is triggered. For example, including the IT Administrator role in a workflow will allow any employee who has been assigned the IT Administrator role at your company to approve the request once submitted and/or reviewed.

In the context of workflows, the Second-Level Manager refers to the manager assigned to the parent team. For example, if you have a Marketing team defined as a parent team and an Online Advertising sub-team under it, the Second-Level Manager for an employee in the Online Advertising team would be the Team Manager of the Marketing team. For more information, see the articles on managing employees and teams.

In the context of workflows, you can include Category Managers in the approval workflows at your company, as the Category Manager role will be automatically included in the options once a manager is defined for the expense category.

In the context of workflows, the Custom Field Manager role can be used to trigger approvals based on specific expense attributes. When a particular value is selected for a custom field of an expense, approval from the corresponding Custom Field Manager will be required.

For example, if you have defined Angela Rossi as a Cost Center Manager when the cost center is Finance and Ivan Ivanov as a Cost Center Manager when the cost center is Hardware, then:

In the context of workflows, each employee in your company can be selected individually when configuring custom approval workflows.

Reassignment of expense approval happens automatically if the approver is linked to a role or role extension (for example, Team or Category Manager), with requests being redirected to the new person assigned to that role or role extension. However, if the approver is a specific employee, the expense requests will default to Payhawk administrators.