Step 17: Set Up Approval Rules

approval rules let you control how payments are reviewed and authorized before they are sent setting up an approval workflow ensures every payment is checked against your organization's policy from day one follow these steps to configure your approval workflow during installation note approval workflows ensure payments are reviewed and authorized according to your policy skipping this step increases risk and is strongly discouraged configure your approval workflow global workflow (recommended default) applies to all of your bank accounts and payment types this is the simplest way to make sure every payment is covered setting up your global workflow to set up a global workflow, please follow these steps create global workflow first, give your workflow a descriptive name this will help you easily identify it later here, you have the option to set thresholds a threshold is the minimum payment amount required to trigger a specific approval tier if a payment is less than the threshold amount, that approval tier will be skipped important each threshold amount must be equal to or greater than the previous tier's threshold note if your system supports multiple currencies for payments, you must first define a base currency for your workflow thresholds are only applied to payments in this base currency any payment submitted in a different currency will bypass the thresholds and automatically require approval from all tiers, as the system does not currently perform automatic currency conversion for this process tip best practice for multiple currencies if you make payments from bank accounts with different base currencies, we highly recommend creating dedicated workflows for those accounts this ensures that your thresholds are properly applied to payments in those specific currencies add approvers to workflow you'll need to add approvers for your workflow enter the user's erp email address exactly as it appears in their erp user record approvers will receive an email notification when a payment meets the required threshold the approver email must exactly match the email in the user’s erp record do not use an alternate or alias emails any mismatch may delay approvals and payment processing important to approve payments, users in an approval workflow need both an erp license and the necessary plugin permissions add multiple tiers add another tier for approval and additional approvers, if needed you can set up to three levels of approval at each level, you can add up to five potential approvers you can also decide how many individual approvals are required per tier eg tier 1 requires 2 approvals, tier 2 requires 3 approvals, tier 3 requires 1 approval note important considerations no self approval you cannot approve your own payments keep this in mind if a single user frequently acts as both the payment creator and an approver best practice for approvers to avoid delays, we suggest avoid having a single approver in a tier adding more approvers than the required approvals (e g , include 4 approvers in a tier that requires 2 approvals) this ensures the process can continue even if someone is unavailable complete workflow once you're satisfied with your settings, click confirm selection you can now review your workflow click create workflow to confirm creation your global workflow is now active! all payments made through the plugin will now follow this approval process editing or deleting workflows you can edit or delete a workflow, but only if there are no pending approvals for that workflow this prevents any confusion or errors with payments currently going through the approval process in the event you need to edit a workflow with associated open payments, process or cancel any outstanding payments associated with the workflow editing a workflow select a workflow to edit click on the workflow you want to edit in the table an overview of the workflow will appear next, click edit workflow edit workflow make your desired changes to the workflow verify your changes and then click save confirm changes you will then see a confirmation of the changes the updated workflow will now apply to all new payments deleting a workflow select a workflow to delete click on the workflow you want to delete click delete workflow confirm deletion next, confirm you would like to proceed with the deletion payments will no longer use this workflow if you still have a global workflow active, these payments will now be routed through your global workflow instead you will then see a confirmation that the workflow was successfully deleted skipping this step you can choose skip step to move on without setting up an approval workflow, but this is strongly discouraged if you skip this step, payments may be processed without an approval workflow in place we recommend setting up your approval rules now to keep your payments protected note approval rule options may vary depending on your erp if you don't see an option described here, or need help configuring a more complex workflow, please contact your fispan support team