Approvals can help you improve financial controls and reduce errors. You can set up one or more approval rules to specify Payment Orders or External Accounts that require human review. A single approval rule consists of conditions and reviewers. Let's consider an example rule: if a payment amount is greater than $1,000,000, I want one member from the Finance team to review it.

Conditions

Conditions describe what needs to be true for a review to be required. They are expressed as propositional logic. A rule can have one or more conditions. In the above example, the condition is “if a payment amount is greater than $1,000,000”. Each condition is expressed as a field, operator, and value combination.

• Fields: Describe attributes of a Payment Order (e.g. the payment amount) or External Account (e.g. if the account was created in the dashboard).
• Operators: Are used to compare the field and value (e.g. is greater than). The types of operators depend on the field chosen.
• Values: Can be raw numbers (e.g. 1,000,000), valid attributes of a Payment Order (e.g a Payment Type can be either a credit or debit) or External Account, or items from your environment (e.g. an Internal Account, a metadata key and value combination).

Reviewers

Reviewers describe which Roles, and therefore which Users, can take actions. You can specify one or more reviewers. Note that users cannot approve payments or bank accounts that they added manually. Additionally, users cannot review an object multiple times.

Reviewers are notified via email and can take actions in the dashboard. Reviewers can approve or deny payments or bank accounts. If approved, payments will be sent or bank accounts will be created. If denied, they will not.

To learn more, see our guides for creating approval rules and reviewing them.