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How to Manage Approval Workflows

Gail Blachly
  • Updated

Modern Treasury's platform allows you to configure approval workflows for payments and external accounts. While this is optional, we recommend our customers use these capabilities to add a layer of control on top of their payment operations. 

When you have approval rules in place for payments or external accounts, each time the respective object is created it is run through our rules engine. The rules engine checks the payment or external account against your organization's approval rules. When a rule's conditions are met, then approval will be required before that payment or external account can be made successfully. 

In this guide you will find

How to configure a new approval rule

  1. Login to Modern Treasury
  2. Navigate to the Settings page
  3. Click "Approval Rules" in the Payments section
  4. Select "Payment Orders" or "External Accounts", depending on the rule(s) you'd like to make
  5. Click "+ New Rule"
  6. Add at least one condition and one approver

A few things to keep in mind when creating approval rules

  • For both conditions and approvers, when there are multiple conditions they must all be met. For example, if two or more approvers are added then they must all approve the same Payment Order in order for it to begin processing.
  • The approver will have to be a member of the selected group. 

If you have questions about creating a rule reach out to us at support@moderntreasury.com

How to approve or deny a payment or external account

  1. Login to Modern Treasury
  2. Click "Approvals" In the Payments section
  3. Select "Payment Orders" or "External Accounts", depending on the object you'd like to evaluate
  4. Click "Approve" or Deny"
    • From the approval queue you can click on a specific payment or external account to see more information when doing your evaluation
  5. Repeat for all objects outstanding approval

Examples

Example 1 

let's say you have the following rules:

Rule 1

  • Conditions
    • amount > 1.00
  • Approver Roles
    • Accounts Payable Team

Rule 2

  • Conditions
    • internal_account = Wells Fargo ***1234
    • amount > 100.00
  • Approver Roles 
    • Accounts Payable Team
    • Finance Execs

Now, let's assume you have a Payment Order fromWells Fargo ***1234for999.99. In this case, both rules will be triggered. That means we take the union of both Approver Roles required, resulting in an approval from someone in bothAccounts Payable TeamandFinance Execs. A few important things to note in situations like this:

  1. The approver forAccounts Payable Teamwill satisfy the approval for both rules.
  2. If an approver where in bothFinance ExecsandAccounts Payable Team, we automatically select therarestcase for them to approve from. In this case, that will likely beFinance Execsgiven it is only on one rule and likely has fewer users.

Lastly, you can have two of the same approver roles on a single rule. That is – something like:

Example 2 

In this situation you have the following two rules:

Rule 1

  • Conditions
    • amount > 1.00
  • Approver Roles
    • Accounts Payable Team

Rule 2

  • Conditions
    • internal_account = Wells Fargo ***1234
    • amount > 100.00
  • Approver Roles (having 2 approver roles means you require 2 approvals for this rule)
    • Accounts Payable Team
    • Accounts Payable Team
    • Finance Execs

In this case we would require one approver fromFinance Execsand two separate approvers fromAccounts Payable Team

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