Cardholders may find other articles in the Expense policy and receipts section to be more applicable.
Overview
As an Admin, you can set up the Expense Approval Policy by navigating to the Expense Policy found under the Settings tab for Transactions and Reimbursements. The workflow builder allows you to configure complex and flexible approval chains based on different conditions.
For example, you'll now be able to route approvals based on accounting coding.
Jump to:
How to set up expense approvals
- Navigate to Settings > Expense policy > Expense approvals
- You can edit your default policy or click "Add approval workflow."
- You'll then be redirected to the approvals workflow builder.
- Clicking any “Add” button will pull up a drop-down of the following options to begin configuring your approval chain:
-
- Spend type — Specify whether you would like the approval chain to apply to only transaction review, only reimbursement approvals, or both
- Require approval — Specify a specific role type, individual, department/location, or custom group to be added to the approval chain. Please note that approval will be required from the individual(s), but you must add an “Approve” statement to conclude the approval flow.
- Notify — specify a specific role type or individual to be notified about the transaction or reimbursement.
- Approve — terminal action that'll end the workflow early if added to the chain.
- Set conditions — add conditions to check various transaction and reimbursement fields (e.g., accounting coding, amount, user role, user department, etc.) that assist in determining the correct approver
You can layer and nest these options within the approval workflow builder to create your ideal approval routing.
Setting conditions 
You can route your approvals through multiple transaction and reimbursement fields. While amount and user role-based routing is available to all customers, the additional conditions in the list below are only available to customers on Ramp Plus.
- Spend type (transaction or reimbursement)
- Amount
- User role
- Business entity
- Direct Ramp manager
- Employee
- Merchant
- Merchant category
- Ramp department
- Ramp location
- Accounting codes
- For accounting coding, we currently display all NetSuite Customers and Jobs in one list, which means selecting a Customer doesn't automatically connect a transaction code to a Customer job. Approval chains will need to be updated for each new job, or if your transactions are coded by the Customer, use the customer field instead.
- If a transaction is split between multiple accounting codes with different approval flows, all approvers in the different chains will be added.
Once a condition has been selected, you can select which options to check for (e.g., if the condition is user role, you would select the role type to check for).
After selecting your desired conditions and options, you will be prompted to add your desired approvers. Learn more about adding approvers in the next section.
Adding approvers
When adding approvers, you can select either predetermined roles/groups or specific individuals at your company.
- Any Admin - group of individuals that have admin permissions within Ramp
- Manager- The requestor’s manager can be added to the chain
- Manger’s manager - The manager of the requestor’s manager can be added to the chain
- Department owner - Ramp will determine the requestor's department and identify the configured department owner. Learn more about configuring department owners here.
- Location owner - Ramp will determine the requestor's location and identify the configured location owner. Learn more about configuring location owners here.
- Custom approval groups can be configured within the People tab. Learn more about custom approval groups here.
- You can add any specific employee within Ramp to the approval flow.
Require all vs. Require any
If multiple approvers are within a step, you must specify how Ramp should handle their approvals before moving to the next step.
- Require all - each individual is required to get approval before proceeding to the next approval step. This translates to “person X and person Y.”
- Require any - only one person from the group is required to approve before proceeding to the next approval step. This translates to “person X or person Y.”
Employee exception requests will follow your customized approval flow for review.
After building your approval policies, any future transaction meeting your selected criteria will follow that approval chain. Existing or pending transactions will not be affected. If you have set transactions to auto-approve, the transactions won't show up in your team's reviewer queues but can still be found in the Transactions tab in your navigation pane.
Separation of duties
If your business requires that the individual who creates the spend object (e.g., the bill creator) cannot approve their spend, you can enable the Separation of duties toggle within the Bill Pay Approval settings.
If the toggle is on, when an individual creates a bill and is within the approval chain, they will be removed from the chain and replaced with admin approvers.
If the toggle is off, when an individual creates a bill and is within the approval chain, they will still be required to approve the bill. Their creation of the bill does not count as their approval.
Only business owners can toggle this setting on and off.