👑 Approval processes are a Premium feature
Who can use this feature?
- Only admins have access to the Company Settings.
What's an approval process?
Approval processes are a Premium feature designed to give control of spending to an organization and an audit on who approved what spend for when things don't go according to plan.
In any approval process, there are 3 different roles involved:
- The booker: the person booking the trip.
- The traveler (or travelers): the people going on the trip.
- The approver (or approvers): the person who approves or declines the trip, usually the traveler's manager.
When booking a trip that requires approval, the trip is sent to the traveler's approver.
Learn more about How approval processes work.
How do I create approval processes?
You can create new and manage existing approval processes from the Approval processes page in Company settings. Note that only Admins have access to Company settings.
Approval processes can be manual or automated.
✍️ Manual approvals
These are approval processes that you manually create and edit inside TravelPerk. You can create as many manual approval processes as needed and they can be assigned to:
- The company: the default approval process that will apply to all employees with no other approval process in place.
- A specific group of employees: an approval process that will only apply to the members assigned to it.
Good to know: if a user is a member of multiple approval processes, the least restrictive approval process will apply.
🔄 Automated approvals
You can automate your approval processes from an HR system like BambooHR, basing them on your company hierarchy and setting the line managers directly as the approvers.
To configure the automated approval processes, go to the Apps section in Company settings, and enable the sync with your HR system.
- Automated approval processes won't let you edit any members or approvers (managers) set from the HR system.
- Any change made in your organization will automatically sync and be reflected in the approval processes page.
Good to know: approval processes are hierarchical: manual approval processes will overrule the automated ones, and automated approval processes will overrule the company default one.
What are the approval settings?
When creating a manual approval process, you'll need to select the setting that will apply to all members. You can choose to apply an approval process for:
🔴 All trips → all trips will require approval
🟠 Out-of-policy trips → only trips that are not within the traveler's policy need approval
🟢 No approval needed → members can book trips freely with no approval process in place, usually for a reduced number of people with no restrictions while booking.
Good to know: you can delete or update your approval process at any time. When you delete an approval process, existing trips and requests won't be affected. The original approvers will still be able to approve all pending trip requests.
How do I manage approval processes?
Once all your approval processes are created or synced from your HR system, you can:
- Search any of the members or the approver's names to find a specific approval process
- Filter their Category (manual approvals or automated approvals) or Approval setting (All trips, Out-of-policy trips or No approval needed) to have a specific view of the approvals you've set up
- Update any manual approval process, by clicking on Edit and modifying any setting or member as needed. Note that automated approval processes can't be edited as they come from your HR system and are based on your company hierarchy.