With the Summer'24 Edition, we released the graphic Workflows Designer which introduces changes in how you used to define the workflows at your company.
If you are using our previous workflow engine and need to check its documentation or want to dive deeper into comparing the before-and-after experience, see our help center articles.
Visibility and layout
One of the greatest enhancements is that you can now grasp the defined workflows at a glance due to the graphic representation of the defined approvers, steps, and criteria.
Conditions, approvers, and custom workflows
The basic criteria for defining a workflow used to be amount-based. You could define single-step, multi-step sequential, and multi-step non-sequential approval workflows.
Now, you can build on top of the amount-based concept and add inspiring flexibility to your workflows with the broader set of conditions based on teams and expense categories. Apart from the default Payhawk roles, for each step, you can define custom roles (Team managers, Second-level team managers, and Category managers) and custom field managers as approvers for specific teams and categories. Also, you can exclude teams and categories from a workflow.
Types of workflows
The types of workflows are the same as before. You can define workflows for expense types (bank transfers with or without purchase orders, card payments, company cash, reimbursements, mileage, and per diem), purchase orders, and card requests.
Workflow fallbacks
Same as before, you can define your custom workflow fallbacks too. An improvement is that for each step you define, you can now see the fallback behavior that will be applied if the step cannot be executed right there.
A use case to compare
Let's look at a sample use case and see how a multi-step sequential workflow will be defined in terms of the previous experience and with the new Workflows Designer.
A multistep sequential approval requires all relevant approvers to approve expense requests one after the other (in sequence) for each specific threshold.
So, let's assume that you want to define the following approval for the Mileage expense type at your company:
Up to EUR 100 will be approved by the Team Manager.
Up to EUR 300 will be approved by the Second Level Manager.
Amounts greater than EUR 300 (Unlimited threshold) will be approved by any Payhawk administrator.
As a result, we want to ensure that if an employee submits a Mileage expense request for:
EUR 150, first, the Team Manager will receive the expense request.
Once the Team Manager has approved the expense, the Second Level Manager will receive the expense request for final approval.
Before
The defined approval workflow before the implementation of the new Workflows Designer will look like the following.
After
The defined approval workflow after the implementation of the new Workflows Designer will look like the following.
