Configuring approval chain at expense category level

This comprehensive guide will help you in configuring category level approval chain for expenses and will give you a detailed walk through of the feature.

What is this feature?

The approval chain for expenses can now be configured at the category level instead of configuring it at expense policy level. This enhancement is majorly beneficial for organizations that have varying approvers for different expense categories such as Food, Travel, and Administration.

Why is it needed?

Many organizations have different approval flows based on the category under which an expense is raised. To allow the organizations configure such rules in the system/expense policies, we have introduced this feature to configure varying approval chains at each category under an expense policy.

How does it work?

How to enable category level approval chain for any expense policy?

To enable category level approval chain in any expense policy, navigate to Org in the left navigation pane and then select the Expenses & Travel tab. Go to Policies & Settings tab on this page.

Based on the need, you can either add a new expense policy or select any of the existing policies of choice and click on the more options icon to edit the expense policy.

After clicking on +Add Expense Policy, under the approval chain section, select the option "No,Approval chain varies by expense categories" to configure approval chain at each category level.

What is a payout approver?

To accommodate existing approval chain configured by you and have no impact on the workflow, we have introduced a new level of Payout approver who will have the final authority to determine the payout mode for all approved expenses.

The payout approver will be responsible for taking action on expenses after they have been approved by others in the approval chain (policy/category level).

Configuring category level approval chain:

Once the expense policy is added, select the policy and add the required categories into it. After adding the categories, click on Setup Rules to configure an approval chain at that specific category.

Along with the other rules of expense category, you will get an option to configure the approval chain and any expense raised under this category will follow that approval chain.

How will employee apply for expenses when the category level approval chain is enabled?

Employees would not see any difference while adding or claiming expenses. But once the expense is claimed, the employee will be able to see the status of expenses grouped by category in case category level approval chain is enabled.

How do approvers take action on the expense claim?

For expense claims whose approval chain is at policy level will not see any difference in the approval workflow and it will be same as the existing approval flow.

But for the expense claims whose approval chain/flow is configured at category level, the expenses will be grouped based on the category and those will be sent for approval to those added in the approval chain.

In case multiple categories has same approver in a level, then only one request will be sent to the approver with both the expenses as part of same request

From Inbox:

The approver would be able to see the expenses which are pending on him/her for approval and will be able to take action on them. He/she will also be able to see the other expenses which are part of the same claim but will not be able to take any action against them.

From My Team:

Reporting managers/L2 managers/Department head/Business unit head if they are part of the approval process will be able to see the claimed expenses in My team >> Expenses & Travel

They will not be able to take action on the individual categories of an expense claim from My team >> Expenses & Travel even if the individual expense is waiting on them.

From Org >> Expenses & Travel:

Privileged users will be able to approve/reject the claim from here. The action cannot be taken on the individual categories and rather the action has to be taken on the complete claim.

When does the claim reach payout approver for last level approval?

After actions have been taken on all the expenses in a claim, the expense claim would be sent for approval to the payout approver. Irrespective of individual categories going through a different approval chain, the payout approver would get the complete expense claim as one request for approval.

Points to be noted:

• If maximum amount based approval chain is enabled, then all the other approval chains (policy/category level) will be overridden.
• Even though few categories in a claim are completely approved, unless action is taken on all the other categories of the claim, the claim will not be sent for approval of Payout Approver.
• In order to ensure a seamless experience, we have moved the current last level approver of the approval chain as the "Payout Approver" of the policy.

We hope that this helped you in configuring and understanding the "Category level approval chain" feature. More questions? Talk to our product experts for more details.