Admin guide: Expense policy agent as an approver

Route low-risk approvals to your expense policy agent and free your team from manual reviews. Once enabled as an approver, your expense policy agent evaluates each submitted expense and either verifies and approves it or flags and escalates it to a human approver — so your team focuses on exceptions.

Save human time: Compliant expenses move through automatically, without waiting for a human review.
Stay in control: Flagged expenses are always escalated to a human approver you designate. The agent can never be the sole decision-maker.
Audit-ready trail: All agent decisions and actions are recorded.

Note: This feature builds on your expense policy agent evaluations. For best results, publish at least one expense policy before enabling expense policy agent as an approver. See Admin guide: Expense Policy Agent and Admin guide: Editing expense policies.

How does this work

Your expense policy agent is a named approver in your Spend approval workflows, similar to adding a team member to an approval chain.

Verified expense: Expense policy agent approves the expense. The decision is logged and reasoning surfaced in your expense details.
All exceptions:
- Flagged expense: Expense policy agent will not approve it. The expense is automatically escalated to the human approver designated in your approval rule.
- Unsupported spend: Expense policy agent cannot approve it. The expense is automatically escalated to the human approver designated in your approval rule.
- System error: Expense policy agent times out. The expense is automatically escalated to the human approver designated in your approval rule.
- Human overrides: Humans are in control. If an approver rejects an expense that your policy agent had approved before, your agent will not approve that expense again on resubmission. All future submissions are routed directly to the human escalation path.

Adding your expense policy agent to your approval workflows

Prerequisites

Before enabling this feature:

Consider having at least one active, published expense policy.
Review your existing approval workflows in Settings > Spend approvals.

Require approval from expense policy agent

Navigate to Settings > Spend approvals and edit the workflow you want to update: card expenses and reimbursements are supported.
In your approval workflows, add a rule or edit a rule where human effort could be avoided.
In the actions, select Require approval from Expense policy agent to add it to the rule.
Add one to many human approver(s) in the escalation path: they are responsible for handling any expense your policy agent didn’t verify.
Save the workflow. Expense policy agent will now be an approver for all new expenses submitted under this workflow.

Tip: When testing for the first time, set your expense policy agent evaluations to visible for Expense admins only in your settings. This lets you watch your agent decisions and tune its behavior before employees and approvers see them.

Guardrails and oversight

This feature is built with mandatory safeguards:

Human escalation is always required. Every rule must include a human approver for exceptions.
Override and remediation. Any named approver or admin can reject an agent-approved expense. Once overridden, that expense is permanently rerouted to the human path on resubmission.
Full audit trail. All agent decisions, approvals and escalations, are recorded with reasoning. Admins access this directly on the expense details.

FAQs

What happens when an expense is flagged for review?

Your expense policy agent will not approve the expense. It escalates it to the human approver(s) designated in your Spend approval rule.

Who can handle escalation?

You can designate dynamic approvers, specific roles, or individual users as the escalation approver. To ensure this human reviewer is only prompted once per expense, make sure "Approvers only need to approve once" is enabled in your workflow settings (default on).

What happens if a human rejects an expense that my policy agent already approved?

Expense policy agent maintains a 99.4% alignment rate with human reviewers, but approvers and admins can always override an agent decision. When they do, the expense can get re-evaluated by policy agent on resubmission, but your agent will not be able approve it again. All subsequent submissions of that expense are routed to the human escalation path.

Can I use this feature without a published expense policy?

You can. Your expense policy agent will apply baseline checks only: duplicate receipts, missing fields, and obviously invalid values. For more advanced automated approvals, publish an expense policy first. See Admin guide: Editing expense policies.

Can I use my expense policy agent as an approver for Company card expenses?

Not yet. Requiring approval from your expense policy agent is not supported for this specific card type. Expense policy agent was trained to perform 24/7 reviews for your Employee card expenses and your reimbursements. Company card expenses are directly escalated to the human path.

Can I use my expense policy agent as an approver for Bills?

Requiring approval from your expense policy agent is not supported for bills. Expense policy agent was trained to perform 24/7 reviews for your card expenses and reimbursements.

How do I monitor the agent’s performance?

Go to Expenses > Settings > Expense policy agent and select View activity on any published policy. The Agent evaluations tab lists all recent agent decisions, and the Feedback tab surfaces user feedback to help you refine your policies over time.

Can I disable this feature?

Removing your expense policy agent from all your Spend approval workflows, or disabling Expense policy agent in your settings will turn off its ability to approve your spend. In the event that it was disabled but approval rules remain, Airwallex will fall back to require any admin’s approval for that step.

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