Enhanced interface

Approve or decline employee expense reimbursement requests

If you are an authorized approver in the payment approval process, this list allows you to select reimbursement requests that you wish to approve or decline. This list includes both regular payments and advances.

Which reimbursement requests appear in my list?

The list of reimbursement requests that is displayed for you to approve depends on how the approval levels are configured for Expenses and for which of those levels you as a user have permissions.

For example, suppose that Level 1 is $500, Level 2 is $5000, and Level 3 is $25000. In this scenario, a payment less than $500 does not require approval, and is automatically approved.

A payment of $501 would need the approval of a user who has permission for Level 1. If you have permission to approve Level 1 amounts, this reimbursement request appears on your list, unless the requisite number of other Level 1 approvers has already approved it. Alternatively, you can be a Level 2 approver without permission to Level 1 (that is, you do not want to see the smaller reimbursement requests in your list), in which case you would see only Level 2 requests.

Subscription	Time and Expenses
Regional availability	All regions
User type	Business
Permissions	Expenses Approve reimbursements: List, Level 1, Level 2, Level 3, Level 4, Level 4, Level 5, Level 6

Go to Expenses > All > Reimbursements > Approve.
Find the reimbursement and select its checkbox.

To approve or decline all reimbursements, select Show all.
Select Approve or Decline.

If you're receiving too many email notifications about reimbursements that are awaiting your approval, you can change your preferences. (Select your login name at the top of any page and select My preferences.) First, if you are in the habit of regularly signing in and examining the lists of reimbursement requests that need to be approved, the email notification feature can be turned off entirely. Alternatively, you can limit email notifications to only those that have amounts about a certain level.

What happens after approving a reimbursement request?

When you select Approve, the system takes one of several actions, depending on the payment type (which is determined by the payment method you chose on the Select To Pay page), and how many approvers are required for this level of payment.

If an additional approval is required after you approve it, the reimbursement request has a Partially Approved status, and the system takes no further action until the request becomes fully approved.

If only one approval is required, or if your approval satisfies all the approval requirements, the system takes the following action, depending on what type of payment this is.

If you chose Check, you can now go to Expenses > All > More > Print checks. In the case of accrual-based companies, the expense is posted to the General Ledger when the reimbursement request is approved. In the case of cash-based companies, the payment is posted to the General Ledger only after the check has been printed, and you have confirmed that it was printed correctly.

You cannot approve the same request more than once. In other words, if two approvals are required, you cannot go in and approve it twice. Once you approve the request, you no longer see it in your list and cannot decline it later.

What happens after declining a reimbursement request?

When you select Decline, the payment is returned to the Submitted state. It can be edited and resubmitted. Whenever a request re-enters the Submitted state as a result of being unapproved, the approval process is reset such that any prior reviews (approvals and/or disapprovals) are nullified. For example, three approvals are required, two approvers have already approved the request, but the third unapproves it. The request is returned to the Submitted state, where it can be edited. Now three approvals are required again. This ensures that all the required approvers see the changes that have been made to the unapproved request. In this case, a user who originally approved it can approve it again.