How to manage Transfer approval workflow?

You can customise a Transfer approval workflow that matches the needs of your business. You also can set up approval workflows that are based on the value amount of the transfer and that require review by one or more designated approvers.

• Who can manage approval workflows for Transfers?
• What is Workflow change policy and how to manage it?
  
• How to create or edit a transfer approval workflow?
• When will a transfer approval workflow become invalid?
• What happens to the transfers waiting for approval when the active workflow is updated?

Who can manage approval workflows for Transfers?

Users with the Transfer Approval Manage permission can create and edit the transfer approval workflow. Due to the workflow change policy, these changes require approval from the account owner(s) before they become effective.

What is Workflow change policy and how to manage it?

As defined in the Workflow Change Policy, changes to the transfer approval workflow require approval from the account owner before they become effective.

• When the Airwallex account has 1 'Owner' user, any changes submitted by a non-owner user need to be approved by this Owner, and any changes submitted by the Owner user are automatically approved.
• When the Airwallex account has more than 1 Owner, any changes submitted by a non-owner user need to be approved by at least 2 Owners, and any changes submitted by an Owner user need to be approved by another Owner user.

The Workflow Change Policy cannot be disabled. You can update this policy by adding Owner user(s) to or removing Owner user(s) from this account

How to create or edit a transfer approval workflow?

Invite users

Please ensure that users you want to approve transfers are added to the account and have Create/Edit Transfer permissions.

You can add someone as a user and update their permissions by navigating to ‘Account > User Management’ in the Web App.’

Create or edit transfer approval workflow

To access the Transfer Approval feature in the Web App, navigate to ‘Transfers > Transfer approvals’. 

1. In the workflow, you can define one or more value amount ranges (or “layers”) for which approval will be required. For example, you can define that for a transfer that is less than a certain amount, no approval is required. 
2. For each amount range (or “layer”), you can define one or more approval steps. For example, you can define that for a transfer that is more than a certain value amount, approval is first required from a junior manager, then from the head of the department.
3. In each approval step, you can define one or more approvers. When there are multiple approvers, you can further define whether any or all of them must be approved. For example, you can define that a transfer of any amount can be approved by any one of the finance managers.
4. You can also choose:
   • whether users can approve a transfer they created themselves
   • whether users can approve the same transfer through multiple approval steps
   • whether the approval workflow also applies to the transfers initiated through client API 

Once submitted, the account Owner users of your Airwallex account will be notified through an email regarding the request.

Review the request to change the transfer approval workflow

As the Owner user of an account, you are notified when someone submits a request to change the transfer approval workflow. You can review the request by comparing the before and after in the web app.

Once approved or rejected, the submitter user will be notified through an email regarding the decision.

Once approved, all users with the Manage access to Transfer approval will be notified through an email regarding the change.

When will a transfer approval workflow become invalid?

An approval workflow will be invalid when there are no viable approval pathways in any “layer”. See below for examples of when this might occur.

1. When a new or updated approval workflow conflicts with an existing workflow. In the example below, the amount range is lower than the upper limit of the previous amount range.
2. When the two additional settings are set as ‘No’, this may result in no approval pathway being available. Account admins will be able to update the workflow. In the example below, no approver can be found for the second approval step when the transfer amount is greater than 1,000 HKD.
3. When there are changes to user settings on the account that prevent an approver being available. This can be caused by a user or role specified as an approver being removed from the account, no longer having Create/Edit transfer permissions, or a role that has no user assigned. In the example below, the ‘Finance Manager’ role has now users assigned to it, so there will be no available approvers.

When a transfer approval workflow is invalid for any reason, a warning message will be displayed as shown below.

Transfers may become blocked indefinitely in these cases. To learn about how to handle transfers that are blocked or requiring approval indefinitely, please visit here.

What happens to the transfers waiting for approval when the active workflow is updated?

A transfer or a batch transfer awaiting approval respects the workflow that was applied at its time of submission. Updating, enabling, or disabling a workflow does not impact the approval workflow for transfers and batch transfers that are awaiting approval.