Expenses claims can be run through a configurable approvals process. Authorising Manager users get notifications about new claims, review them, then can either approve or decline a claim, or send the claim back to the claimant with a request for changes or to ask for more information.
Teams are used to create approval structures. Users with Administrator or Account Manager permissions can configure and create Teams. The key characteristics of Teams are:
- Each team usually has a user nominated as the manager. This user must have the Authorising Manager role.
- Each team allows a user nominated as the reporter. This is a sort of read-only role that lets that user generate various reports summarising the expenses claims made by the team's members. This user must have the Reporting role.
- Each Team can have multiple members. If approvals are enabled, each member's expenses will then need to be approved by the team's Manager before the expense is able to be exported to the company accounting software.
- Authorising Managers can be managers of more than one team. This means they will have approval responsibilities for all team members across all teams they manage.
- An expenses claiming user can be included in more than one team. If those teams have different managers, then their claims may be approved by any one of them.
Administrators and Account Managers can edit user profiles and set them so that they skip approval. This means that, whether or not they belong to any managed teams, their expenses will be automatically approved when submitted. No manager users wll be involved.
While you don't need to use the approvals workflow to set up teams - they can just be useful groupings of employees for data maintenance purposes, or used to help with reporting - the two often go hand-in-hand.