Approval tiers

Every payment run requires at least one approver before the funds are withdrawn from your account to pay vendors. However, your organization may require more than a single person approving the payments. You also may require that different payment amounts require different people to approve.

You can define up to 5 approval tiers for payments with Payment Assistant. The rules you set are applied per payment, not per payment run. So you can apply as many payments as you want in a payment run of varying amounts and the approvals required will be determined by each, individual payment amount.

Tip: Payment Assistant adheres to the invoice record option for payments, allowing either to combine payments for multiple invoices or pay each invoice individually with a separate payment. For example, if a vendor has multiple invoices in a payment run, they would either receive one combined payment for all invoices or separate payments for each invoice.

By default, you are set up with one approval tier for $0 and above. Anyone with the Payment Assistant approver permissions can approve, and it only requires one approval. We recommend you review if this works for your organization or if you need something more specific to your needs.

Set up your approval tiers

From Payables, Settings, select Approval tiers under Payment Assistant.
On the Set tiers tab, determine how many payment tiers you need. Each tier can have its own rules for approving the payment. You can have a maximum of 5 tiers. After you enter the starting amount in the From amount column for a tier, the To amount updates automatically for the prior tier.
After you finish defining your tiers, select Next to go to the Rules tab.
For each tier, you define the rules for when a payment needs approving within that tier. Each tier can have 1-2 sets of rules, known as a step. Begin with your first tier and step, and search for and select the approvers.
Select whether all need to approve, one of them needs to approve, or at least a defined number of people need to approve.
If you need another step for a tier, select New step. Then, add the approvers and your requirements.
Complete the step rules for each tier.
Select Next to see a summary of all the rules you defined.
To enable the approval tiers, select Finish.

Approval tier notifications

When you set up approval tiers, you are also defining email and in-product notification settings. The approvers you define are all notified, unless you adjust their settings on Approver notifications.

Tip: We recommend you set up approval tiers first. If your approvers require adjustments to their individual notifications, then adjust their settings from Payables, Settings, and under Payment Assistant select Approvers .

Notification order

Email and in-product notifications are sent based on the order of the approval tiers.

When you select Submit for approval, the first set of emails and notifications are sent for the first tier.
After the final Approve is selected for the tier, the next set of emails and notifications are sent for the approvers in the second tier.
After all the approval requirements are met for each tier, the person who submitted the payment run is notified and the payment run status is updated to Approved - Awaiting funds.