In this article we will explain how to set up your approval rules in Moss. If you want to read about how approval rules work in general, see here.
Go to the approval rule page
You can create your approval rules by following these steps:
Open up Moss
Go to “Settings” > “Approval rules”
When you arrived at the page you can start working on your approval rule book in draft/edit mode.
Draft/edit mode
The edit mode allows you to see your draft rule book and make changes without having to publish them instantly. You can try out different setups and test out all the possibilities.
Click on “Edit rules” to go to the draft/edit mode. Once you have done that you can start creating rules and building out your rules book.
There are multiple steps you can take now.
Create a new rule: Click on “+Add new rule” in the upper right corner
Edit an existing rule: Click on the rule that you want to edit
Move the priority of an existing rule: By clicking the arrows on the right side of each rule you can move rules up or down
Delete a rule: Click on the 3 dots and select “Delete”
Duplicate a rule: Click on the 3 dots and select “Duplicate”
Note: If you have many rules you can use the filter option to only show the rules that apply to certain expense types.
If you’ve made any changes to your rules (changed the priority order, edited a rule, deleted a rule or created a new rule) you must choose from 3 options: discard changes, save for later or publish.
Save draft: Will save any changes to your draft rule book. If you’re doing a lot of work on your rules in one session and you don’t want to lose the changes, remember to hit ‘save for later’ occasionally.
Publish: Will replace your currently published rule book with the new version you've been working on in edit mode.
Discard: Will discard any changes you've made to your draft rule book since entering edit mode.
Note: You cannot edit multiple rules and only publish some of them. If you want to do so, you have to make sure to undo the rule that you don’t want to publish right now. Once you have done so, publish the rules you wanted to update. After that you can redraft your other changes and safe them in the draft version.
Start building your own rule book
Remember this when building your rule book: Rules are evaluated from top to bottom in the order you set them. The first matching rule that can be applied will be used and any rules below won’t be considered. Therefore it’s important that you place the more specific rules first in the list, and the broad / generic rules lower in the list. As such, your entire list of rules need to be created and reviewed in one to ensure that the automation of approval requests works as you desire.
Start off with one spend type
By starting off with one spend type and building out the rules for it (invoices, reimbursements, card transactions and card requests) you can start building the rules book for one spend type piece by piece instead of having to work on multiple spend types simultaneously.
Note: If you want the rules for all of your spend types to be identical, it makes sense to do them all simultaneously.
Build out general rules
We suggest that you start off by creating your general rules for the spend type. By doing so, you will create a general baseline for the whole company. Every request that comes in and is not routed to a more granular rule will be routed through this general rule.
Do you need condition based rules?
You can set up conditional rules to create more granular rules. You can create these rules based on these conditions:
Amount: You can create rules based on the amount that the request is.
Department: Requests that come from employees from this department will be routed according to this rule.
Team: Requests that come from employees from this team will be routed according to this rule.
User: Requests that come from this/these employees will be routed according to this rule.
Cost center: Requests that are assigned to a specific cost center will be routed according to this rule.
Cost carrier: Requests that are assigned to a specific cost carrier will be routed according to this rule.
Expense account: Requests that are assigned to a specific expense account will be routed according to this rule.
Supplier: Requests that are assigned to a specific supplier will be routed according to this rule.
Check your approval routing
Once you have your approval rules set up and start using Moss you will be able to see why your expenses need to approve by a certain person. By checking this, you can make sure that your approval rules have been set up correctly.
You can check the approval routing by clicking on any spend item and going to the "Comments & Activity" section. There you can view who the approvers are and based on which approval rule they have been chosen.
