Approval processes are a Premium feature
Who can use this feature?
- Only admins have access to the Account settings.
What's an approval process?
Approval processes are a Premium feature designed to give control of spending to an organization and make sure people book in policy. Define and customize the approval rules to define who should approve which trips or receive email notifications about them.
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 reviewer (or reviewers): the person who approves or declines a trip when it needs approval, or just receives a notification with no action needed.
When booking a trip that needs 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 your Account settings. Note that only Admins have access to Account 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:
- Default: the default approval process that will apply on an account level to all employees with no other approval process in place.
- No approval needed: one group set specifically for travelers who can book trips freely with no approval process—usually for a reduced number of people with no restrictions while booking.
- A specific group of employees: an approval process that will only apply to the members assigned to it. You can have as many specific manual approvals as needed.
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 the approval processes with integrations, basing them on your company hierarchy. Simply integrate with BambooHR or user provisioning tools like Microsoft Azure.
To configure the automated approval processes, go Account settings, then Integrations, 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 on the approval processes page.
When enabling approval processes in an automated user provisioning system, existing approval processes will be deleted. We’ll replace them with new automated approval processes created through the automated system. Don’t worry, you can save existing ones by downloading them as a CSV.
When disabling the automated approval processes you will have 2 options:
- either delete all approval processes so you can start brand new
- or convert all existing automated approval processes into manual ones
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. If you need automated approval processes for most of the users, except for a few ones, you can create manual approval processes for them.
What are approval rules?
When creating an approval process, you'll need to configure at least one approval rule. An approval rule is a set of conditions made up of an approval type (what), an approver or reviewer (who), and an approval setting (when).
Approval type
First, you'll need to select an approval type, this is either:
- Request approval, which sends an approval request email to an approver
- Send notification, which sends a notification email to a reviewer but they won't be able to approve or decline
Reviewer
After selecting the type, you can define who should approve which trips or receive email notifications about them.
Reviewers are usually this group's line manager in the organization. But in the case of notifications, it may simply be someone else who needs to know about a specific person's trips.
Approval settings
🔴 All trips → all trips need approval
🟠 Out-of-policy trips → only trips that are not within the traveler's policy need approval
🔵 In-policy trips → only trips that comply with the traveler's policy need approval
🟡 You can also apply specific approval rules based on the cost center assigned to the trip.
No approval needed
For the "no approval needed" group, you can optionally also set notification rules for specific settings.
These emails won't require any action from the reviewer. They will simply receive this notification to have further visibility of the traveler's trips.
How do I manage approval processes?
Once all your approval processes are created or synced from your integration 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 pressing Edit and changing 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.
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.