Fyle’s robust approval engine enables you to add multi layer of approval for expenses submitted by the employees, in addition to their assigned primary approver.
As an admin, you can create any workflow to route expenses to different approvers. Here are some examples of what you can do:
Create a standard approval workflow for all your employees.
Create project or cost-center based approval workflows.
Create employee specific or department specific approval workflows.
Create approval workflows to route expenses to specific approvers based on expense conditions.
Note: Access to Approval workflows is only available to customers on Business Plan or Enterprise Plans.
How to create an approval workflow
Types of Approvers
Before understanding approval workflows and how to set them up, let’s have a look at what all different approvers are present on Fyle below:
Employee approvers: These are unique to each employee and can be set-up in Admin Settings > Employees > Add/Edit Employees. Do note that multiple employees can have same employee approvers.
Primary Approver
Secondary Approver 1
Secondary Approver 2
Project approvers: Each project on Fyle allows for two approvers to be assigned to it and can be set-up in Admins Settings > Organization > Projects. Again, multiple projects can have same project approvers.
Project Approver 1
Project Approver 2
Department approver: Each department on Fyle can also have a dedicated approver. These can be set-up in Admins Settings > Organization > Departments. Again, multiple departments can have same department approvers.
Department Approver
Apart from above mentioned sources, additional approvers can be set using their email while building an approval workflow.
Create approval rules
Once you have assigned required approvers in the above sources, you will have to create approval rules to set routing. Follow the steps below to create an approval rule:
Navigate to Admin Settings > Workflows > Approvals.
Click on Add rule.
The approval rule form will open up. Under approver, select your desired approver. You can also skip primary approver whenever this rule triggers. Click yes, if you want to skip primary approver.
Select the category of expenses targeted by this rule (choose expenses inclusive/exclusive of a certain category).
Choose who is affected by this rule (choose which employees the rule applies to).
Set the rule conditions (any other expense details that the rule should trigger for).
(Optional) You can set additional actions like flagging expense, capping amount or require additional reason for expense under rule actions.
Enter the rule description or click auto generate description to automatically create a one for you. Note: this description will be visible to employees in Policies and rules section and within expenses when a rule is triggered.
Click Save.
Note: All orgs have a default approval rule to add primary approver to all expenses. This rule cannot be modified but it can be re-ordered in the sequence. Primary approver can also be skipped if the action is toggled ‘yes’ inside an approval rule.
Order approval rules
The order in which approvers see the report is determined on how the corresponding rules are stacked in the approvals section in workflows.
As an admin you can change the order in which approvers see the reports by simply re-ordering the approval rules. Follow the steps below to re-order approval rules.
Navigate to Admin Settings > Workflows > Approvals.
Click Re-order.
Drag and drop the approval rules to set them in order you want your approvers to see the report in.
Once done, verify the order and click Save.
Note: This action will re-run all policies and approval rules against unreported expenses within your organization. Depending on the number of such expenses, it may take 2-5 mins to for changes to reflect across your organization.
Let’s understand further using an example:
You want all reports to follow the order: Primary Approver > Secondary Approver 1 > Secondary Approver 2
To do so, you create two approval rules. One to add Secondary Approver 1 and another to add Secondary Approver 2 to all expenses.
You now see three approval rules in total with corresponding numbers on the left side of the rule:
Primary Approver
Secondary Approver 1
Secondary Approver 2
This means reports will move in the correct order as expected.
To understand how to build a secondary approver workflow, click here
To understand how to build a project based approval workflow, click here
To understand how to build a department based approval workflow, click here
If you want more assistance with approval set-up, reach out to our team at [email protected]