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Admin Guide: Conditional submission forms for Expenses (Beta)

This feature is currently in beta.

Table of Contents

Overview

This article is a guide to using Airwallex's conditional submission forms, which allow you to tailor your expense submission form to each spend item. Rather than showing every submitter the same static form, you can build rules that make individual fields required, optional, or hidden depending on conditions you define. Some examples:

  • Only re quiring expense submitters to add a receipt and description while hiding the accounting fields from them
  • Making Attendees only required for certain Expense category selections

To view and manage them, navigate to Expense > Settings.

How do I build submission form rules?

There are two components to each rule: conditions and field behaviour. If the conditions for a given rule are met, the field behaviour from that rule will apply to the submission form.

First, select "Edit" to enter edit mode. Here, you may add, remove or reorder rules within each individual field. Please note you now have separate forms for card expenses vs. reimbursements. Current available conditions include:

  • Amount: Dollar-based threshold
  • Accounting fields: Specific accounting values. 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.

Coming soon:

  • Employee fields: Department, Location, Entity (GEM customers only), User. If you select multiple values within a given employee field, they are joined by an OR.
  • Card type (employee vs. company card)

If you do not want any conditional rules for a field, just use the existing default rule as your single setting for the field.

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 field behaviour for the rule. For each field the rule should control, choose one of three states:

  • Required: The submitter must complete the field before submitting
  • Optional: The the field is shown, but the submitter does not have to complete it.
  • Hidden: The field is removed from the form and is not shown to the submitter but is visible / editable by admins, both from expense details and Spend > Accounting

What happens when more than one rule affects the same field?

Unlike approval steps, field behaviour cannot stack — a field can only be required, optional, or hidden, never more than one at once. When two or more matching rules set a different behaviour for the same field, Airwallex applies a fixed hierarchy, regardless of the order in which your rules appear:

Required > Optional > Hidden

In other words:

  • Required always wins. If any matching rule sets a field to required, it will be required.
  • Optional beats hidden. If no matching rule requires the field but at least one sets it to optional, it will be shown as optional.
  • Hidden applies only as a last resort. A field is hidden only when every matching rule for that field sets it to hidden.

This ensures a field is never hidden away while another rule still expects the submitter to complete or see it.

Example:

  • Rule 1: Condition: If Amount > 500 then "Receipt attachment" is Required
  • Rule 2: Condition: If Department = Contractors then "Receipt attachment" is Hidden

For a $700 expense submitted by an employee in the Contractors department, both rules match. Because Required outranks Hidden, "Receipt attachment" is shown as Required on the form.

What happens if none of my rules apply?

The form will reflect the default applied for the condition at the top of the page. For example, “Expense category is optional unless another rule applies.”

What happens with itemised spend items with different line values?

Line item level fields are evaluated per line item. As a result, different line items can have different requirements. Amount based conditions evaluate against the total, not the per-line value. 

Example:

  • Tax rate default optional.
  • "If amount > $50 then tax rate required," and "if location = Melbourne then expense category required." 
  • On a $100 expense with two lines (Line 1 = $20/Melbourne, Line 2 = $80/Sydney), both lines get tax rate required (because the $100 total exceeds $50), but only Line 1 gets expense category required.

If I change my submission form rules, does that affect spend items that have already been submitted?

No, submitted spend items are based on the form version at submission time. Editing rules will only affect future spend items or spend items that have been recalled or rejected and must be submitted again.

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