The Expense Claim Workflow lets you define who can submit expense claims, how they are reviewed and approved, and what happens in Xero once a claim is finalised.
Once enabled, Requesters gain access to the Expense Claims section in ApprovalMax, as well as a personal receipt workspace called My Expenses, where they can capture receipts and create expense claims from them.
Setting up the workflow
In the main menu, find your Organisation and open the Approval workflows page under Workflows and settings. Click on the Expense Claim workflow.
In the first step, add the users who can create and submit expense claims in ApprovalMax.
Click Add a Requester to add users individually, or click Add all users to bulk-add all members of your Organisation. When bulk-adding, ApprovalMax matches users to Xero contacts by email address. To restrict what each Requester can submit, click the Matrix icon to configure the Requester matrix.
The next step is the Review step. This step is added by default but is optional; if your Organisation does not require a review stage, you can remove it. Click on Add a Reviewer to add Reviewers and click on the Matrix icon to configure the Review matrix, which controls which claims each Reviewer sees and what fields they can edit.
The next optional step is an Auto-Approval step. Any claims matching the rules defined here will be automatically approved and bypass all further approval steps. To add an Auto-Approval step, click on the + Icon in the workflow and select Add Auto-Approval step.
Then click on Auto-Approval settings to configure your rules.
The Approval step is where you add the Approvers who will approve or reject expense claims. Click on Add an Approver to add Approvers.
You can add as many approval steps as needed to represent the number of authorisation levels in your Organisation by clicking on + Step.
For each approval step, click the Matrix icon to configure approval conditions, including routing by expense type, employee, amount, supplier, account, and tracking categories.
Each Approval matrix also includes an Editing matrix that controls whether and which fields an Approver can edit on a claim during approval.
Once all Approvers are added, set the Approval condition for each step. Choose whether any of or all of the approvers need to approve for the step to be completed.
The final workflow step is the Post-approval actions, which are automatic and not configurable. For corporate card claims, a separate Spend Money transaction is created in Xero for each expense line. For out-of-pocket claims, a Bill is automatically created in ApprovalMax and routed through your Bill workflow.
When all steps and conditions have been set, click on Activate the workflow.
And that’s it! Once activated, you can start on your first request by clicking on Go to requests.