Expense Approval

As discussed in General Workspace Settings, default time and expense approval settings can be set for the workspace. However, each project in Ruddr can be set up for either manual or automatic time approval, depending on the requirements of the project. Here are the three types of approvals for time and expense in Ruddr:

• Automatic
• Manual
• Client

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Automatic Expense Approval

If a project uses automatic expense approval, the expense items will be immediately approved by Ruddr when those items are created. As such, each expense item will enter into an approved status. Members can continue to edit and delete expense items until they enter into a locked state.

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Manual Expense Approval

If the project uses manual expense approval and the Multi-Step Approval Workflow feature is disabled in the workspace, the Project Admin will be notified to review and approve (or reject) submitted expense items. The expense approval configuration for a project can be found in the Approval Options section (Figure 1) of the project’s Settings tab. Multi-Step Approval Workflow If your workspace has the Multi-Step Approval Workflow feature enabled and your approval options are set to Manual, then you will be able to specify whether you want to leverage the workspace’s default approval workflow or if you want to specify a custom workflow for this project. For more information, view the Managing Multi-Step Approval Workflows article in the Ruddr Help Center.

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Submitting Expense Items for Approval

Expense items can be submitted for approval from the expense report detail screen (Figure 2). This screen includes a listing of all expense items associated with an expense report. To get to this detail screen, simply click on any expense report shown on the expenses screen. At the bottom of the expense report detail screen, there is a Submit for Approval button that will show the number of expense items that will be submitted. Clicking this button will submit all expense items on the report that are not currently in the Approved or Pending Approval state. If a project is setup for automatic expense approval, expense items will be approved immediately when they are saved.

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Pending Approval Notification

When an expense item on a project has been submitted for approval, the Approvers established for the project will be notified in multiple ways. The Approvers will always receive an email message such as the one shown below (Figure 3). From this email, each Approver can click the Expense Approvals button and immediately take action. If your workspace has enabled Multi-Step Approval Workflow, each approver would receive this email notification as the workflow advances through the steps configured for the project. If multiple approvers are specified for a single step, all approvers will receive this notification. If your workspace does not use this feature, the Project Admin would receive all notifications and be tasked with the approval actions. Additionally, if the workspace has the Slack integration configured, the Approver will also receive a direct message from the Ruddr bot in Slack. Finally, any time a workspace member has expense items that are awaiting approval, the member will see a red dot next to the Expenses nav bar item (Figure 5). When the Expenses submenu is shown, the number of items pending approval will be shown in a red circle next to the Approvals menu option. Note that a workspace member will not see the approvals menu option if the member’s assigned security role does not have permission to approve expense entries.

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Approving Expense Items

When an expense item that requires manual approval is submitted, any workspace member who has the appropriate permissions for the associated project can approve or reject the expense item. The Project Admin on the project will be the person notified about the pending approval, but any member with the appropriate permission can take action. Expenses are approved from the Approvals screen (Figure 6). within the Expenses area. This screen will default to showing all expenses that are pending approval by the logged-in user. The list can be filtered by date, project, status, member, and approver. The approver can click on any row in the approvals list to see the full details of the expense item. Edits can easily be made to the expense item before it is approved or rejected. To approve or reject an expense item, the approver should use the “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” buttons (Figure 8) on the right side of each row of the approval list (Figure 6). Once an entry has been approved, it will be shown with a green “thumbs up” circle as shown below (Figure 9). If the approval needs to be reversed, you can click on the thumbs up circle again to remove the approval. When an entry has been rejected, it will be shown with a red “thumbs down” circle (Figure 10). If the rejection needs to be reversed, you can click on the thumbs down circle again to remove the rejection. When an approver rejects an expense item, a reason for the rejection must be provided. After clicking the “thumbs down” button, a window (Figure 11) will be shown that will allow the approver to type in the rejection reason. Figure 11 - Capture the Reason for Rejecting the Expense Entry

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Bulk Approval Actions

If approvers have a large number of expense items to review and take action on, it is possible to approve or reject items in bulk. To do this, simply select the rows to approve or reject and then click on the bulk action button at the bottom of the approvals list screen (Figure 12). The bulk action button defaults to “Approve” but can be switched to “Reject”. Note that if you reject multiple expense items in bulk, the reason you provide for rejection will be applied to each rejected item.

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Client Approval of Expense Items

On certain projects, your company may be required to get client approval of time and expenses before creating an invoice. For these situations, Ruddr provides a client approvals feature. When client approvals are enabled for a project, a batch of time and expenses can be sent to the client for approval. For more information, see the client approvals article.