Moss’s approval capabilities automate approval routing across all of your spend - corporate cards, employee reimbursements, and accounts payable. With customisable rules based on amount, team, user, supplier, department, cost centre, general ledger codes, or any combination of these (and more), you have full control over who approves what and when. Additionally, built-in tracking and audit trails provide complete visibility at every step.

Approvals in Moss are flexible enough to handle routine approvals, high-value transactions, and unique exceptions—ensuring requests are routed efficiently and compliance is maintained. See here for examples of just some commonly used approval rules.

Take a look at this demo of the new approval rules:

Your approval rules consist of multiple rules that seamlessly work together to form a comprehensive framework like an approval rule book. This rule book determines who should automatically receive the approval request for any scenario.

Each organisation/entity has 1 rule book with its own set of rules. If your organisation has multiple entities, rules must be created and maintained independently for each; they cannot be duplicated across different entities.

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.

Draft mode: Each organisation/entity has a draft rule book. This allows you to work on your rule book over time, consult with colleagues and iterate on it before finalising it for use throughout the organisation.

Learn more on where in Moss you can create your approval rule book.

Each individual rule consists of

Each rule should have a unique name.

Rules can apply to certain types of requests. You can decide how many and which request type the rule should apply to. We have 4 different types of requests:

With the 4 request types, you can create general organisation-wide rules that will apply to everybody. These are often used as the general rules that will be used if there are no more granular rules. More granular rules can be created with conditions.

Purchase requests will use the same approval rules as for invoices. Hence, they are grouped together as one request type. Rules that apply to invoices and purchase requests will be considered when either a purchase request or an invoice is submitted for approval.

Conditions allow you to make rules more granular and/or handle exceptions to general rules, e.g. you can have an organisation-wide general rule for invoices but maintain a different rule for the marketing department.

Below you can see the conditions that can be used to set up rules.

Learn more about how field based conditions work.

There are various ways to select who should approve each rule, here is the breakdown:

If multiple approvals are required you’ll need to create multiple approval steps. Here’s how it works.

How approval steps work

Learn more about how field based approvals work.

Threshold amounts can be assigned to each step - when it is so, the respective step will be required if the amount exceeds the defined threshold.

Each rule has its own setting for how to handle cases where the same person is asked to approve twice or the approver is also the submitter.

With these settings you allow or prevent a single person from having authority over the approval of a request or expense. This is best explained with examples.

Let’s say that you require 2 out of 3 people to approve certain expenses. I would configure my approvers as such:

Or if Ricardo, Martina and Nikita are in the same team and I always need 2 approvals from anyone in this team (regardless of who the members of the team are at the time of the request) then I would configure my approves like this:

However, if, for example, Ricardo approved in Step 1 then we don’t want to allow him to approve in Step 2, we must get the next approval from Martina or Nikita. To set this up you need to select the Require Someone Else’s Approval option for the “If the approver already approved” scenario in the 4 eyes section of your Rule. With this set the 4 eyes principle will be enforced automatically for you.

Rules can also be based on the value present in specific accounting fields at the time a request or expense is sent for approval. This can be done via 'field based conditions' or 'field based approver roles'.

Field based conditions allow an entire approval workflow to differ depending on the accounting fields allocated to the request or expense at the time of submission for approval:

Allow the specific approver within a specific step to be different depending on the cost centre or cost carrier the request or expense has been allocated to. The available “field based” approver roles are:

Accounts payable:

If you have suppliers sending invoices directly to a centralised accounts payable email inbox you will need field based approval routing rules.

Field-based approval rules work especially well for invoices because (a) the submitter is not a user and (b) the accounting fields of invoices are pre-populated and entered by the finance team during the review step of the workflow before invoices are sent for approval.

Cards and reimbursements:

If travel and incidental expenses need to be approved by the functional line manager of the employee, whereas all personal development or software costs need to be approved centrally by the HR team or the head of IT.

If the spender is irrelevant and the primary way of routing approvals is based on the nature of the spend. For example, a consultant can work on multiple projects and incur expenses that need to be paid from the relevant project’s budget.

Take a look at some common use cases. Those might give you a general idea on how you want to setup your rules before we explain how to structure your approval rules in details.