Approval workflows are an integral part of controlling spend and help us ensure that right people are reviewing a spend request.
In Spendesk, approval flows are integrated with cost centers and can be created or managed from within “Cost Centers” section in Settings.
You can specify the right approvers for a specific cost center using following capabilities:
Amount thresholds: you can define approvers based on amount thresholds. For e.g. Approver A for any amount less than €1000, and Approver B and Approver C for any spend higher than that
Order of approvals: for each threshold, you can decide whether the request should be approved by any of the approvers, or all of the approvers (in the given order).
Roles or specific individuals: You can specify the approvers in a workflow in following ways:
Specific individuals: you can select any specific member of the company in Spendesk to approve a request.
Reporting Manager role: you can select the “Reporting Manager” role as approver, to ensure that the direct reporting manager of a requestor approves a spend. Even if the person playing this role changes, the request will automatically be redirected to the new reporting manager.
Cost Center Owner role: you can select the “Cost Center Owner” role as approver, to ensure that any person playing the role of owner of that cost center can approve the request. Even if the person playing this role changes, the request will automatically be redirected to the new cost center owner.
Approver role - Reporting Manager
This approver role automatically identifies the current reporting manager of the requestor and redirects the spend request to them for review.
The reporting manager of an employee can be set in 2 ways:
Automatic: Leveraging HR integration, we can automatically populate the Manager field of all employees.
Manual: Admin can manually set the Manager in the Members section for any employee. These managers will now have the “reporting manager” approver role applied to them.
Approver role - Cost Center Owner
This approver role automatically identifies the current owner of the cost center of the spend and redirects the spend request to them for review.
This approver role can be set up by choosing a owner, while creating or updating a cost center. This owner will automatically have the “cost center owner” approver role applied to them.
Approval flows for exception scenarios
For specific exception scenarios (when requestor is also an approver in the approval flow or when Reporting Manager role is set as an approver, but the reporting manager information of the requestor is missing), the following logic is followed:
if that approver step is the only one in the workflow, the request goes to the Account Owner
if that approver step is the only one in an approval threshold, but there is a another [higher level] threshold, the request goes to that high level threshold for approvals
if that approver step is in a multiple step workflow, but is not in the last step of that flow, that step is ignored and the request goes to next approver in the flow
if that approver step is in a multiple step workflow and is in the last step, the request goes to next threshold for approvals
in all other cases, it goes directly to the Account Owner