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Admin Guide: Expenses and Bill Approvals

Table of Contents

Overview

This article is a guide to using Airwallex's powerful, multi-conditional Expenses and Bill approvals. Please bear in mind that Transfer and Vendor approvals do not follow this same framework.

Airwallex's Expenses and Bill approvals are rule-based, allowing you to customize highly specific rules to route your Expenses and Bills to the relevant approvers. To view and manage your Expenses and Bill approvals, navigate to Settings > Spend Approvals.

How do I build approval rules?

There are two components to each approval rule: conditions and approval steps. If the conditions for a given rule are met, the approval steps from that rule will apply to the spend item.

First, select “Edit” to enter the edit mode. Here, you may add, remove or reorder rules. Select "Build rule" in the top right corner. Then, you will be prompted to add any conditions you would like to apply. Current available conditions include:

  • Amount: Dollar-based threshold that triggers the rule
  • Accounting fields: Specific accounting values that trigger the rule. If you select multiple values within a given accounting field, they are joined by an OR.
    • If you are not seeing your accounting values, please navigate to the Connections page and ensure you have enabled values with your desired fields
  • Entity [GEM customers only]: Trigger that allows you to create rules for specific rules across various Airwallex entities
  • No condition: Alternatively, you may select no condition at all, in which case the rule will apply to all expenses or bills. This is useful for a simple, blanket control.

To build highly specific rules, you may use more than one condition. In this case, all conditions must be met for the rule to apply. 

Next, you will set the required approval steps:

  • The first dropdown determines if this rule triggers any approvals.
  • A single rule may have one approval step, multiple approval steps, or not require approval at all.
  • If you would like this rule to trigger approvers, you will have the option of 3 data types to insert into your rule:
    • Roles: Routes to users with this role to approve
    • Manager: Routes to the user's manager to approve
    • Individual users: Routes to the individual user(s) selected
  • All approval steps may call for either any of the chosen selections to approve or all of the chosen selections to approve. This is an important distinction:
    • "Any of" requires only a single user from this step to approve
    • "All of" requires all users in this step to approve. Please note that if you use "all of" with a dynamic Role, it will require all users with this role to approve.

How do my rules apply?

For a given Expense or Bill, Airwallex will scan all of your rules and add approval steps from any and all rules with conditions that have been met. If multiple rules apply to an expense or bill, Airwallex will add the approvers of each rule.

Example rule setup:

  • Rule 1: Expenses less than or equal to $50
    • Condition: If Amount is < or = 50
    • Approval steps: Helena approves
  • Rule 2: Expenses greater than $50
    • Condition: If Amount > 50
    • Approval steps: Jamie approves
  • Rule 3: Travel rule
    • Condition: If Expense category = Travel
    • Approval steps: Admin approves

Please see the below illustration to demonstrate the approval flow for a $100 expense where Expense category = Travel:

How do I reorder my rules? Why would I need this?

When in the edit state, you can reorder rules using the up and down arrows next to each of your rules. This is used to determine the order in which approvers are added to a workflow. 

This is useful if you have a desired sequence for your approval steps, but it does not change which approvers are added (they will be added regardless of the order).

What happens if none of my rules apply?

By default, your workflow has a backup rule, which serves as a safeguard in the event that no other rules apply.

What if an approval step calls for a dynamic value but the submitter does not have an assigned manager?

This behavior varies by product:

  • For expenses, it will route to any admin for approval instead
  • For bills, it will be blocked and require the submitter to recall, update the workflow or add a manager, and resubmit

Advanced settings

There are two available advanced settings, found in the top right of the Expense and Bill approval pages:

  • Skip duplicate approval steps: If enabled, any expenses or bills triggering the same user to approve more than once will be skipped.
    • Please note that only steps where the user is the only available approver in more than one step are skipped. If the user is required once and then later included in a step with other users, the second step will not be skipped.
  • Allow submitters to approve their own expense/bill: If enabled, if a user is an eligible approver for their own expense or bill, they may approve it. If disabled, they will be blocked from doing so.
    • If you disable self-approval, we recommend ensuring that your rules do not result in blocked workflows, where the only available approver is the user who submitted it.

What about Expenses or Bills with different line items?

This FAQ is only relevant if you have rules based on accounting data. If you only have amount-based rules or rules that apply to all expenses, this is not relevant.

For expenses or bills with split accounting allocations, Airwallex uses the line item with the highest value to determine the approval flow. Specifically:

  • Card expenses: Use the accounting allocations from the highest value line item
  • Reimbursement reports: Use the accounting allocations from the highest value reimbursement
  • Bills: Use the accounting allocations from the highest value line item

What if I don't want any approval steps required for some expenses or bills?

In this case, set your conditions to reflect the desired scenario without approval steps, then select "No approval required" in the approval section of the rule.

You must ensure that no other rules with approvers apply in this scenario. If this rule is triggered alongside a different rule that requires approver(s), they will still be added.

Can I edit approval workflows for expenses or bills post-submission?

Not at this time, but this functionality is coming soon.