Mesh provides a powerful approval workflow engine, empowering you to craft a customized card/budget request approval to meet your organization's unique needs. In addition to expenses, the tool provides the option to create/edit a workflow for card/budget (i.e., General Purpose and Subscription) and Travel. 

Follow the steps below to set up an approval workflow for submitted expenses. 

1. Log in to the Mesh platform with your Admin profile. 

2. Navigate to your Company Name and click on Company Settings.

3. Scroll to the Approval Workflows section and click the Approval settings button. 

4. Expand the 'Expenses' menu. 

5. If you wish to change the approval workflow, navigate to the upper right corner and click the Edit button.

6. Click on one of the steps to change its properties.

6a. Select one of the following approval types: Mesh role (e.g., Admin/Pro, Approving Manager, or Trave Manager), an Employee (i.e., a specific user), or a 'Group' of users. 

Note: All members of a designated group will receive a notification, yet only one member needs to take action by either approving or declining the request. You can reuse previously created groups, which become accessible after you create and publish the workflow. Each group can accommodate up to 50 members, and you can create multiple groups as needed.

6b. Select the relevance of the step: 'Always' if the step is applicable in all cases, and 'Conditionally' if the step's execution depends on specific conditions, such as the amount is 'larger than $100', the department being equal to 'sales' or location being 'New York'. Consider using flags as conditions.

6c. After you complete the selections for an approval step, please click on Save to store this step. 

7. You may also click on a step, Delete it, and add other steps instead. 

7a. Click the + icon between steps to add a sequential step. 

7b. Click the + icon of a step to add a parallel step. 

Note: The 'parallel' option distributes the request to all parties involved in the step simultaneously. For instance, if three individuals are involved, each will receive the request and can approve it at their own pace, independent of others. Progression to the subsequent step within the workflow occurs only after all 'parallel' approvers have completed their tasks. If conditions are applied to the 'parallel' step, only the pertinent approvers are prompted to take action, effectively introducing branching within the process.

8. You can modify the step name to facilitate a clearer comprehension of the approval process for anyone reviewing the request. The updated name will reflect across all forms containing the list of approvers.

9. After defining all the steps to mimic your organization's approval process, Publish the approval workflow. Here is an example of such an approval flow.

As you can see in the following example, several conditions were used to establish an approval workflow for expenses. 

10. The published workflow will be used when users submit reimbursement requests. 

Disclaimer: The approval workflow editor is robust and flexible, allowing users with an Administrator profile to replicate their company's card/budget approval process. Mesh Payments does not provide recommendations for approval workflows. As a result, we cannot be held responsible for approval workflows created by customers. This includes card/budget approval workflows that may be considered 'non-logical' or ones where steps were intentionally or unintentionally omitted.