If your organization requires employees to obtain approval from multiple individuals when booking flights or hotels or submitting expense reports, you can easily set this up with our flexible approval process at a group or individual employee level. While we encourage organizations to simplify their approval process to reduce friction during the process, we fully understand and support more complex requirements around approving travel bookings and expense reports.
🔼 Setup multiple approvers
As a company admin or owner, you have the option to set up multiple approvers either at an individual employee level or at a group level. To provide more control and clarity over the group level approval process, you can now set a primary group for each employee. Once set, the approval process and approvers associated with this primary group are selected and applied for the employee when they submit a travel request or expense report. Employees will no longer be able to change the designated approvers, unless overridden by admins at the employee level.
👥 Group level approvers
Navigate to Company Settings and then click on Groups
From the list of existing groups, select the one you want to update
In the group details view, you'll find information like the group name, approval process, approvers, group members, and the policy section.
By default, the approval process is set to Anyone can approve. This means that when employees select this group during submission, they can choose any approver from the list of approvers and the booking or expense report only needs to be approved by the selected approver.
Alternatively, if the admin prefers multiple approvers in a specific order, they can opt for the Everyone must approve option. With this selection, employees can no longer select approvers and the travel booking or expense report must be approved by all the approvers in the order listed.
Add the list of approvers for the selected approval process from your existing users
Finally, click the Save group button to save your changes
👔 Employee level approvers
Navigate to Company Settings and then click on Users
Locate the specific employee you want to set up approvers for, and click on their name
In the Edit user modal, find and select Approver 1 for this employee. You may continue adding multiple approvers for this employee by clicking the +Add Approver option
Click on Save to save your settings
How are the approvers determined?
This will largely depend on whether the employee who is submitting the travel booking request or expense report has employee level approvers, a primary group, the approval process and approvers set for the primary group, or otherwise. The following describes the process of selecting approvers in each of these cases:
If the employee submitting the travel booking request or expense report has approvers set at the employee level, this set of approvers is selected in the order specified. The employee cannot change the approvers or the approval process, even after changing the group to attach to the travel booking or expense report.
If the employee submitting the travel booking request or expense report does not have any approvers set at the employee level, but has a primary group setup, the approval process and corresponding approvers are selected from the employee's primary group. If the approval process for the primary group is set to Anyone can approve, the employee can select any approver from the list of approvers specified for the group. If the approval process for the primary group is set to Everyone must approver, the employee cannot select or change the list of approvers nor their order.
If the employee submitting the travel booking request or expense report does not have any approvers set at the employee level, nor do they have a primary group set, the employee can select any eligible group to attach to their request, and the corresponding approval process and approvers would apply in this case. If the approval process for the selected group is set to Anyone can approve, the employee can select any approver from the list of approvers specified for the group. If the approval process for the selected group is set to Everyone must approver, the employee cannot select or change the list of approvers or their order.
How do employees keep track of the current and/or next approver for a request?
There are multiple ways that employees can monitor the progress of a travel booking request or expense report during the approval process, depending on whether they are the submitter or an approver.
If you go to Booking details section or the Expense report details as a submitter or approver, you can see the Current approver for the request. If the approval process for this request is Everyone must approve, you can click on See details next to the current approver to view the current progress of the request, along with a list of previous and next approvers
To access a detailed record of every event in the approval process, click on Approval History to get a comprehensive view of the entire approval journey, including comments made by each approver, reasons for any rejections, and even comments submitted by the requester when seeking approval.
As a request makes its way through the approval process, we proactively send email notifications to both the submitter and approver at every step of the way.
✏️ Note: When an expense report that is making its way through multiple approvers in order (Everyone must approve), and is rejected by any approver, when re-submitted, the expense report will start with the first approver all over again.
✏️ Note: As a travel booking request makes its way through multiple approvers in order, any price changes are visible to the current approver, and must be approved by the current approver before progressing.
💡 Pro-tip: Travel bookings are more sensitive to price changes, the longer they spend in the approval process. Keep the number of approvers to a minimum to avoid price increases and sold out travel options.