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 or specific employees as part of the approval workflow.

In Payhawk you can include the following roles or people 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 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 roles 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.

By default, in each step and for each workflow, you will be able to include employees with Payhawk accountant or administrator rights. For more information, see the article on roles and rights in Payhawk.

The Team manager in Payhawk is a custom role because you may decide not to assign team managers for specific teams, or disable the team structure for your organization.

In terms of workflows, the Team manager is the manager of the team to which the employee submitting the approval request belongs.

Note that Teams enables you to define a custom team structure of teams that may not correspond to the internal hierarchy of your company. For more information, see the articles on managing employees and teams.

The Second level manager in Payhawk is a custom role because you may decide not to have sub-teams or disable the team structure for your organization.

In terms of workflows, the Second level manager is the manager assigned to the parent team. For example, you may have defined a Marketing (parent) team and Online advertising as its sub-team. 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.

The Category manager in Payhawk is also a custom role because you may decide to assign one or more managers to each expense category value that you have created. If assigned, 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.

By design, you can assign one or more managers to each custom field value you create for your organization. Then, you can use the Custom field manager role in the workflows. Based on the selected value of a given 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:

Each employee at your company will be available for you to select when defining your company's custom workflows.

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