What is Approval Policy?

Approval policies on Volopay allows admins to delegate approvers based on specific payment range. The admins can add multiple range limits inside each policy and set different approvers based on these limits.

Why?

Approval policies help businesses ensure each request is routed through the correct approval flow as per their company policies making the process transparent.

What is the Approval policy on Volopay?

Approval policies on Volopay are subdivided into two parts:

Approval policies for cards?

To apply various approval policies for Cards, multi level card approval features need to be activated. Please contact your account manager to activate it.

Who can create policies?

Only admins can create, edit or delete a policy. You can have upto 5 ranges for each policy.

Approval policies can be assigned for Cards, Funds requests, Bill Payments & Reimbursements. Users can create multiple approval policies as per their requirements and have different policies assigned to each of these modules.

Step 1. Click on the ‘+ Create approval policy’ CTA. It will redirect you to the policy.

Step 2. Enter the name you want for this ‘Approval Policy’.

Step 3. Enter the minimum amount for which you want the transaction or the fund requests to go through the approval flow. Note that any transaction for a lower amount will be auto-approved.

Step 4. Select the ‘First Level approvers’ basis your organisation’s approval policies. Selecting the first level approver is mandatory. Note that any one of these approvers can approve the transaction/request.

Step 5. Select the ‘Second Level approvers’ basis your organisation’s approval policies. Selecting the second level approver is not mandatory. Note that any transaction or request will come for their approval after a first level approval is done.

Repeat steps 3 to 5 for every approval range that you want a different approval flow for. This, like everything else, again, depends on your organisation’s approval policy.

Step 6. Click on the ‘Create Policy’ CTA & voila, your approval policy has been created.

Example: When the policy’s approval amount starts with $200, this means any payment/fund requests below $200, will not be triggered to any approvers and will be auto approved. Anything equal to 200$ or more will go for approval to that approver.

Note: Approval policy will be triggered for the base currency equivalent of the payment you are making. For example, if your base currency is SGD and you are making a payment of USD 750, the approval flow will be triggered according to SGD 1000 (assuming the FX rate at that time is 1SGD=0.75USD).

Tip 1: If you want approval for each and every transaction in the budget, then the first limit should start from 0.

Roles and other things to note.

First level Approver: The first level approver will have the authority to approve any transaction or any fund request at the first stage.

Note 1: The budget owner is by default 1st level approver for any policy & the admin can change the same.

Second level Approver: Once a transaction or fund request is approved by the first level approver, it will go to the second level approver for approval.

Note 2: For the same limit range, the first level approver and second level approver cant be the same.

Note 3: It's essential to have one approver in every limit (the budget owner will be the default approver but the admin can override this).

What is the default policy and everything else?

The Default Policy

A default policy will be applied to all the transactions with approval limit as 0 to infinity. Thus every transaction will be routed through the budget owner by default. The default policy is also editable.

Approval Policy in Global Settings

The approval policy enabled in the manage tab for Cards and Bill Pay will be the default policy for Card funding approval & Bill payments approval respectively. However, you can create different approval policies and attach those for cards & bill pay in the budgets separately.

What happens to my current approvers for various budgets when policy is changed?

If you already have approvers for transactions and requests in a budget, a new policy will be created with a budget name, as per the cards and bill pay approvers in the budget’s policy.

The policy will start from 0 and will have the first level approvers of cards (if multilevel card approver is enabled) or bill pay as the first level approver of the new approval policy and second level approvers as the second level approvers for the new approval policy.

Note: Any payment which was not fully approved will reset during migration and you will receive alerts and notifications for the same.

What can an Admin do?

As the admins are the only ones authorised to make changes in an account, they can access policy settings & create, edit or delete an approval policy.

Note: First level approvers and second level approvers can't be the same for multiple ranges. However, the same approver can be there in the other ranges of the budget.

Eg: If you have created the first limit as 0 to 100, and you have person A as the first level approver, you cannot make person A as the second level approver here. However, if there is another limit that you have created in the same policy which ranges from 101-500, the person A can be the first level or second level approver for this limit range in the same policy.

How to edit an approval policy?

Admins can easily edit an approval policy by clicking on the pencil icon over the policy.

An admin can delete the second approvers from a limit range by clicking on the delete option against the approver’s name.

In that case the transaction goes through the first level approver only. One needs to click on the ‘Update policy’ CTA button in order to save the changes.

Note 1: First level approver is mandatory, the other approvers are optional.

Note 2: If a transaction is pending for approval for a certain approver & the approvers are changed in the policy in the meantime, the remaining approval flow for the payment goes through as per the new approvers selected in the approval policy.

What happens when a policy is deleted?

Admins can delete an approval policy from the approval policy screen. When deleting an approval policy the budgets originally it was assigned to, will have the “Default policy” as the new policy.

Note: All pending approval payments or expenses will go through the default policy approvers if the respective policy is deleted.

How to tag the policies to the budgets?

For Bill pay, once the policy is created, the admin can go to the respective Budgets and click on ‘Settings’, an additional option will show at the bottom as “Choose the payment approval policy”. Here, you select the policy that you want for approval of Bill Payments.

Note 1: If the budget currently has no bill pay approvers, after migration it will have default policy attached to it.

Note 2: Budget settings for fund approvals and payment approvals will override the global settings.

What if I have no budgets?

Please note that there may be updates on this topic from the time of publishing. We recommend reaching out to your account manager, or drop us a chat message, to clarify your concerns. Thank you!
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