Approvals

Approvals let you require a second person to sign off before certain actions take effect, such as posting a large invoice or approving a supplier bill. You decide which actions need approval and who gives it with Approval Policies. Approvers work through their Approvals inbox, and My Delegations covers holidays and absences.

When no policy applies to an action, it goes ahead straight away, so you can start without any policies and add them as your team grows.

What can need approval

You can create a policy for each of these actions:

Posting an invoice.
Issuing a credit note on an invoice.
Refunding an invoice payment.
Writing off an invoice balance.
Approving a bill.

Before you start

To see and create policies you need permission to view and manage approval policies, usually held by admins.
To see your inbox you need permission to view the approvals inbox, and to approve or reject requests you need permission to act on approvals.
To delegate your approvals you need permission to delegate.
Approval steps are assigned to roles, so set up your roles first in Team Management. See Team and roles.

Create an approval policy

Go to Invoicing (AP-AR) > Approval Policies and click New policy.
Enter a Name and, optionally, a Description. Both appear in the inbox and the audit log.
Choose the Resource type, the action this policy controls.
Choose a Pattern for how the steps run, such as one step after another or several at once.
Under Trigger conditions, decide when the policy applies:
- Amount min and Amount max limit it to a range, for example only amounts over 10,000.
- Currency limits it to one currency. Leave it blank to match any currency.
Build the Approval ladder. For each step, choose the role that approves it and how many approvals are Required from people in that role. Tick Parallel if the step can be approved at the same time as others. Click Add step for more steps.
Optionally set an SLA (hours), the time approvers have to act, and choose what happens On SLA expiry. Leave the SLA blank for no deadline.
Set a Priority. When more than one policy matches the same action, the higher priority wins.
Leave Self-approval unticked unless the person who made the request should be allowed to approve it, then click Save.

The list on Approval policies shows each policy’s resource, the conditions under which it applies, its ladder, SLA, priority and status. Click the edit icon to change a policy.

To stop using a policy, click the deactivate icon. Deactivated policies are kept for your records, and requests already in progress carry on under the rules they started with.

Approve or reject a request

Open Approvals from the sidebar. The inbox lists every request waiting on you, either because you hold the role a step needs or because it was delegated to you. The top of the page shows how many are waiting and how many are overdue.
Click Review on a request to see the details: the invoice or bill, its amounts, who requested it, each step on the Ladder and its status, and the Activity so far.
Click Approve or Reject, add an optional Comment, and confirm.

An approval moves the request to its next step. The action itself only takes effect once every step is approved. A rejection closes the request and the action does not happen; a rejected bill shows as Rejected.

You can also click Comment to add a note without changing the status. The person who made the request can withdraw it with Cancel request.

Self-approval prevention

By default, nobody can approve their own request. If you made the request, the request page says You can’t approve your own request and the Approve and Reject buttons are not shown to you; another approver on that step has to act. This keeps the person who creates a transaction separate from the person who signs it off.

If a small team needs it, an admin can tick Self-approval on the policy to allow it.

Delegate your approvals

Going on leave? Hand your approvals to a colleague for a set period.

Go to Invoicing (AP-AR) > My Delegations and click New delegation.
In Delegate to, choose the team member who will approve on your behalf.
Set Active from and Active to.
Under Resource types, tick the kinds of request to delegate. Leave them all unticked to delegate every kind.
Add a Reason, for example “Out of office May 1–8”, and click Create.

While the delegation is active, your requests appear in your delegate’s inbox with an On behalf of badge. The audit log records both the delegate who acted and you as the original approver.

My Delegations lists Delegations I’ve given and Delegations given to me, each marked scheduled, active or revoked. Click the revoke icon to end a delegation early. Your delegate stops seeing your approvals immediately, and anything they already approved stays on record.

How it works

Every decision is recorded. Approvals, rejections, comments and cancellations all go into the request’s activity and your workspace audit log.
Policies are copied onto each request. Editing or deactivating a policy does not change requests that are already in progress.