Payment approvals is a feature currently in beta and is only available for some accounts. If you don't see this in your account, stay tuned!
Payment approvals require that after a payment is initiated, while still in scheduled status, be approved by at least one other user before it can process.
Payment approvals are different from bill approvals. See the Resources section below for information about bill approvals.
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Payment approval policies
Set up payment approval policies to choose which payments require approval. Users with Manage Company Info and View Bank Accounts permissions will be able to create payment approval policies.
Notes:
- You don't have to be bank-authorized to create a payment approval policy.
- To select a user to be an approver, the user will need to be authorized to the specific bank account the policy is for.
To create a payment approval policy:
- Select Settings
- Select Payment Approvals under Approvals
- Select New policy
- Enter policy details
- Nickname - Enter a recognizable nickname for the policy
- Funding account - the bank account to debit payments needing approval
- If you have multiple bank accounts, you'll need to create a separate policy for each bank account
- Payment Amount - Approvals will be required for payments greater than this amount
- Choose how many people must approve
- Any (default) - If more than one approver selected, only one on the list needs to approve
- All - all approvers on the policy will need to approve the payment with no required order
- Select approver
- All users entitled to the bank account selected as Funding account will show up here
- Users don't need bill approval permissions in their role to approve payments
- There's no limit to the number of approvers you can select
- All users entitled to the bank account selected as Funding account will show up here
- Select Save
Note: Editing or inactivating approval policies won't apply retroactively. It will only apply to payments scheduled in the future.
Approve or deny payments
Users with permissions to view Payments Out will see payments pending approval with a status of pending approval on the Payments Out page. Payment approvers will also have a to do list item for payments pending approval.
To approve payments:
- Select the pending approval payment from the Payments Out page
- Select Approve & pay
The payment is now scheduled and will process on the selected process date. - Note: If the approver approves the payment after the selected process date, the process date will be the next business day after the approval
To deny payments:
- Select the pending approval payment from the Payments Out page
- Select More actions
- Select Deny
- Enter a comment explaining why you are denying the payment
- Select Do not approve
The payment is now canceled.
When you deny a payment, we send a notification to the payment creator with the comment you provided.
- You'll need to schedule a new payment if the bill still needs to be paid.
Payment details
The payment initiator will be displayed on the payment details page so the approver can see who scheduled the payment.
We'll also display the approval status and who the approval request was sent to.
Things to know
- If the only user assigned to approve a payment is inactivated before approving the payment, you'll need to cancel the payment, update the Payment Approval policy with a new approver then reschedule the payment. The payment record will have a notification in the Approval Status section on the payment details page.
- If more than one approver is required on payments, only the last approver in the chain will see Approve & pay, all other approvers will just see an Approve button
- All approvers on the policy will receive an email notification there's a payment to approve, even if the payment only requires one of them to approve
- Payment approval emails are system-generated and can't be controlled with email preferences
- This feature isn't available on the mobile app
- Bill.com does not provide support of beta features
