How to manage custom approval workflow and policies?

Learn how to manage your custom approval workflow and policies in BILL.

Jan 30, 2024

BILL offers custom approval policies to help you maintain separation of duties and reduce potential fraud by allowing you to control which bills need approval, by whom, and when, based on business need.

Custom approvals are available with the Corporate, Enterprise, or Accountant price plans , giving you even more options when you create approval policies. If you're on the Essentials or Team price plan, please see the standard approvals article, or upgrade your account to take advantage of custom approvals.

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Bill approval settings

Your bill approval settings are high-level, general settings for when and how you use approvals on your payables transactions. You can choose to use these settings alone, or in combination with specific policies outlined in those sections of this article.

Users with appropriate permissions can find bill approval workflow options in settings.

1. Select Settings
2. Select Approval Settings under Approvals
   • You can also select the three dots menu on the Approvals page, and
     select Approval Settings
3. Select settings to apply (described in detail below)
4. Select Save

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Would you like to add a bill approval step to your workflow?

This setting determines if bills will require approval before you pay them.

• Bills are routed for approval and are ready to be paid when approved (default
  setting): This option will make sure Payers cannot pay a bill that hasn't been fully
  approved. Also, we won't notify Payers that it's time to pay bills until they are
  fully approved if you enable this setting.
  • Users with Pay unapproved bills via BILL and/or the Pay unassigned bills
    via BILL permissions (Administrators and Custom user roles) can
    pay any bill, regardless of its approval status, even if you enable this
    setting.
• Bills don't need approval and are ready to be paid once entered into BILL:
  This setting allows you to pay bills as soon as you create them— no approvals are
  needed.

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Allow edits to bills and vendor credits after they're routed for approval

This setting determines if changes are allowed on bills and vendor credits during the
approval workflow, after they've been fully approved, or at any time.

• Never allow: You cannot make changes to bills or credits if any approvers have
  already approved them.
  • If you need to change an approved bill or vendor credit, you'll need to
    delete it and create a new bill or credit.
• Only allow before the last person approves the bill: If bills or credits have
  multiple approvers, you can make changes to them until all approvers have
  approved them.
  • If you edit a bill or credit while it is going through an approval chain, a
    notification banner on the bill or credit will appear, and edited fields will be
    highlighted.
• Always allow: You can make changes to bills or credits at any time until you pay
  the bill or apply the credit.
  • Once you pay a bill or apply a vendor credit, only a limited number of
    fields are editable.
  • If you edit a bill or credit while it is going through an approval chain, or
    after it is approved, a notification banner on the bill or credit will appear,
    and edited fields will be highlighted.

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Default approvers

You can select up to 3 default approvers that we'll automatically assign to either all new
bills or all new bills without approvers, depending on your selection for this setting.

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Bill approval settings: Things to know

• Approval settings are global for all bills.
• Changing these settings won't apply retroactively to previously created bills and
  vendor credits and will only apply to future bills/vendor credits.
  • The settings in place at the time a bill or credit was created will always
    apply to that bill or credit. If you need different settings to apply to an
    existing bill or credit, you'll need to delete the bill or credit, make the
    settings changes, then recreate the bill or credit.
• Bills can be paid even if they haven't been approved. This setting doesn't override
  user role permissions, i.e.: the Payer role cannot pay unapproved bills, no matter
  this setting.
• Approval status doesn't sync to or from any accounting software.

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Bill approval policies

With our custom bill approval policy options, you can save time and provide control by
creating policies that automatically add approvers to all bills you create or sync to BILL.

Note: Approvers on policies won't automatically be applied to recurring bills or bills
created via the developer program API. You'll need to manually add approvers to those
bills.

Create a bill approval policy

1. Select Settings
2. Select Bill Approvals Policies under Approvals
   • You can also select the three dots menu on the Approvals page, and
     select Approval Policies
3. Select Create New Policy
4. Enter your policy details, criteria, and approvers
5. Select Save

You can create policies based on the following criteria:

• Vendor
• Department
• Bill Amount
• Line Item Amount
• Chart of Account
• Class
• Customer
• Location
• Job

Things to know:

• Once you assign approvers to a bill for a vendor, Smart Data will remember and
  automatically assign those same approvers on the next vendor credit for the same
  vendor.
  • If you don't want Smart Data to automatically apply the previous approvers
    to new bills, you can turn that off at the top of the Bill Approval Policies
    page
• You can have up to 300 active policies, including bill and vendor credit policies in
  total.
• One policy may include multiple criteria.
• For each criteria, you may select more than one value. For example, you can select
  multiple vendors for one policy if a specific policy will apply to specific vendor
  types.
• If you sync with Intacct you'll need to set dimensions (vendors, employee,
  customer) to yes under Accounting Preferences to view them in the criteria
  dropdown menu.

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Vendor credit approval policies

You can set up policies to require approvers for any vendor credit based on the dollar
amount.

Create vendor credit approval policy

1. Select Settings
2. Select Vendor Credit Approval Policies under Approvals
   • You can also select the three dots menu on the Approvals page, and
     select Approval Policies
3. Select Create New Policy
4. Enter the details
5. Select Save or Save & Create New Policy

Note: Setting mandatory approvers doesn't assign the approvers to vendor credits, you'll need to manually assign them. If you create a vendor credit and try to save without the required approvers listed in your policies, you won't be able to save that credit. An error message will tell you the current policy being applied, and which approvers are required.

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Approval assignments and example

• Whenever you create a bill or a bill syncs to BILL, we'll automatically add
  approvers from all policies that apply to that bill.
• If multiple policies match a bill, we'll add approvers from all matching policies.
• The order of approvers is determined first by the order of policies, and second by
  the order of approvers within a policy.
• You can reorder policies if needed.
• If the same approver is on multiple policies, they will only be assigned to a bill
  once.
• Approvers from approval policies cannot be removed from a bill, but you can
  reorder them if needed. However, they still need to be in order based on the order
  they're listed on the policy.
• We don't automatically apply approvers to vendor credits. You must manually
  assign them in the order they're listed on the policy.
  • If you create a vendor credit and try to save without the required approvers
    listed in your policies, you won't be able to save that credit. An error
    message will tell you the current policy being applied, and which approvers
    are required.

Example: 

Policy 1: Department and Location Approvers

Policy 2: Bill amount over $50,000 Approvers

Example bill with approvers applied Approvers

In this example, both policies 1 and 2 apply to the example bill.

• Policy 1 applies first and adds the following approvers: Bob, Bill, and Barry.
• Policy 2 then applies and adds Betty. Barry isn't added twice, even though he is on both policies.
• Approvers are added in order by policy 1's specified approver order, then policy 2's specified approver order, excluding any approvers already added by a previously applied policy, and so on until all applicable policies are applied.

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Replace or delete approvers on policies in bulk

If you have a change in approvers, you can delete or replace them in your policies as needed manually by editing the individual policies and bills, or in bulk to change all policies and existing at once.

Replace approvers

1. Select Settings
2. Select Approval Settings under Approvals
   • You can also select the three dots menu on the Approvals page, and select Approval Settings
3. Select Manage Approvers, then select Replace Approver.
4. Select an approver or an approver group you'd like to remove.
5. Select an approver or approver group to replace the one to be removed.
6. Select Now to process the change now, or select a date to process the change later.
7. Select Save

We'll replace the approver or approver group on all policies and existing bills—this may take a few minutes depending on how many policies and bills you have. When the change is complete, we'll send you an email to let you know.

Delete approvers

1. Select Settings
2. Select Approval Settings under Approvals
   • You can also select the three dots menu on the Approvals page, and select Approval Settings
3. Select Manage Approvers, then select Delete Approver.
4. Select an approver or an approver group you'd like to delete.
5. Select Now to process the change now, or select a date to process the change later.
6. Select Save
7. If deleting the approver or approver group will leave any policies without an approver, you'll see a warning popup. Select Yes, Delete to complete the deletion anyway, or select No, Go Back to make changes or cancel.

We'll delete the approver or approver group on all policies and existing bills—this may take a few minutes depending on how many policies and bills you have. When the deletion is complete, we'll send you an email to let you know.

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Approval policies: Things to know

• The order of approvers you assign to a bill or credit must match the order of the mandatory approvers listed within any policy.
• All approvers you add to a bill or credit must approve the bill or credit for it to be considered Approved, and the bill or credit must be approved in the order of the listed approvers.
• If you edit or delete a policy, it won't apply retroactively to previously created bills or credits and will only apply to future bills or credits.
  • The policies in place at the time a bill or credit was created will always apply to that bill or credit. If you need a different policy to apply to an existing bill or credit, you'll need to delete the bill or credit, make the policy changes, then recreate the bill or credit.

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Upgrade to custom approvals

We highly encourage all users to upgrade to our new approvals experience! By upgrading to our new custom approvals experience, you will gain the following benefits:

• Approvers from policies are automatically added to all manually created bills.
• Approvers from policies are automatically added to all synced bills.
• Approvers from policies are automatically added to all bills created by Intelligent Virtual Assistant in your Inbox.
• The ability to create approval policies on 10 bill criteria.

In order to use custom approvals, you must be on our Corporate or Enterprise price plan. Upgrade your price plan. If you are currently on one of those price plans, you will see the ability to upgrade to custom approvals over the next few weeks as we rollout the feature. If you don't see it yet, stay tuned!

If you have existing standard approval policies when you upgrade to custom, We'll move those existing policies to your new custom approvals policies, keeping the settings and selected approvers the same. Before we switch your account to custom approvals, we'll ask you to verify they transferred correctly.

Verify transferred approval policies

1. Select Settings.
2. Select Approval Settings under Approvals.
3. Review your policies, and if they're correct, select Save.
   • You'll keep standard approvals until you select save.