Approve or Reject an Expense Claim
Approvers review expense claims and either approve them or reject them with a reason.
Who can approve expense claims?
The following roles can approve or reject expense claim requests:
Account Owners
Team approvers
Cost Center approvers
Approvers cannot approve their own requests unless the company’s spending policy explicitly allows self-approval.
Before you start
To approve or reject an expense claim:
You must have the Account Owner, Team approver, or Cost Center approver role.
The requester must have submitted the expense claim through Requests.
You can also approve or reject expense claims from the Spendesk mobile app.
Approve or reject an expense claim
Every week, approvers receive a notification about pending expense claims waiting for review.
To review an expense claim:
Go to Requests > To approve.
Select the expense claim you want to review.
Review the information provided by the requester, including the amount, description, and receipt.
Amend the description or any other information if needed.
Click Edit amount if you need to change the amount to be reimbursed.
Choose one of the following options:
Click Approve Request to approve the expense claim.
Click Deny Request to reject the expense claim.
If you deny the request, enter a reason.
The member who submitted the expense claim receives a weekly email notifying them of the request’s status.
You can also approve or reject expense claims directly from the Spendesk mobile app.
TIP: If part of an expense claim is incorrect, you can ask the requester to edit and resubmit it instead of rejecting it. This saves time because the requester does not need to complete all the fields again.
What happens after approval?
Once approved, the expense claim moves to Expense claims > To review.
Controllers and Account Owners can then review and reimburse the expense claim.
After reimbursement, the expense claim moves to both the Prepare tab and All payments.
Important
Once an expense claim has been approved in the review step, it cannot be reverted, rejected, or corrected from the interface, even if it has not been reimbursed yet. If a claim was approved by mistake, contact Spendesk Support for guidance.
Why an expense claim may no longer appear in “To approve”
An expense claim may no longer appear in Requests > To approve if:
Another approver in the approval flow has already approved or rejected it.
An Account Owner has already approved or rejected it.
This is expected behavior. Check the relevant expense claim review or payment tab to view its current status.