Approval workflow

An approval workflow is a defined process for reviewing and approving expenses or trips in a company. It ensures that travel expenses and receipts are reviewed by authorised persons before they go to accounting. This creates transparency and control in expense management.

How an approval workflow works

1. Employees record their trip or expense and submit it for review.
2. The responsible approvers are notified and check receipts, amounts and occasion.
3. They approve or reject with a reason.
4. Approved expenses are reimbursed and passed to accounting; rejected ones can be corrected and resubmitted.

Approval workflow in Spesenfuchs

In Spesenfuchs, employees submit their trips and single receipts for review. For each employee, you determine who reviews their expenses, one person or several approvers. With several approvers, you also determine the approval rule:

• One approval is enough: the expense is approved as soon as the first approver has agreed.
• All must approve: the expense is only approved when every assigned approver has agreed.

The rule applies to all expenses of the respective employee. If an approver rejects, the review ends; a reason is mandatory. The employee can correct the expense and resubmit it, and then all approvers decide again.

You will find all options on the feature page Approval workflow.

Email notifications

When an expense is submitted, the approvers receive an email and see the expense on their dashboard. When an expense has been fully approved or rejected, the employee is informed by email, together with all remarks of the approvers. Optionally, a third person, for example accounting, can also be informed of approvals. Partial approvals under the rule “All must approve” do not trigger an email.

Details can be found in the support article on email notifications (in German).

Setup

You set the approvers and the approval rule in the employee’s master data in the review and approval section. Employees without an assigned approver approve their expenses directly themselves.

Detailed instructions can be found in the support article on setup (in German).

Approval view and status tracking

Approvers find all pending reviews under Team in the review and approval area. In the list of expenses under review, the filter “My open reviews” shows exactly the expenses that still need their decision; the list of approved expenses covers the last 180 days. A progress bar shows how many approvers have already agreed, and the history documents every decision with date, time and remark. If you wish, the approvals also appear as a separate table in the PDF report. Employees can see the status of their expenses at any time on their dashboard.

More about the view in the support article on the approval view (in German).