In Yokoy, you can choose how your company manages expenses with standard workflows that combine business approval with finance review. Alternatively, you can choose to build your own custom workflows that determines how expenses are approved and then reviewed in your organization.
Business approval (approval strategy) always precedes finance review (finance review strategy). This ensures that all necessary business approvals are granted before the expense is transferred to the Finance team for finance review.
Business approval strategy
Your company can choose one of four strategies:
No approval required: Submitted expenses go directly to the Finance team for finance review without needing an approval.
Cost object approval: Submitted expenses must be approved by the relevant cost object manager(s) according to the cost object hierarchy before being sent to Finance for review. If cost object approval thresholds are in place, further approvals may be required if the expenses exceed the threshold.
Line manager approval: Submitted expenses require approval from each submitter's line manager prior to Finance review. If line manager approval thresholds are in place, additional approvals may be needed if the expenses exceed the threshold.
Custom workflow: In this case, you choose how submitted expenses must be approved by building your own workflow using the Workflow Designer. This allows you to combine line manager and cost object approval strategies or even determine who approves and when by using attributes of the expense. For example, if the expense is over €100k, route the document both to line manager and the cost object owner for approval.
🚧 Caution
You can change your desired approval strategy at any time. However, the new strategy will apply to new expenses processed from that moment. Any existing expenses will use the previous approval strategy.
If you want to process existing expenses with a new approval strategy, you must delete the expense and resubmit them.
Finance review strategy
Finance review strategy ensures that all necessary accounting and finance checks are conducted before the expense is exported and booked in the finance system of your company.
Your company can choose one of three strategies:
Manual review always required: Fully approved expenses by business managers are sent to the Finance section in the Review tab and require manual review by the Finance team before appearing in the Export tab of the Finance menu. Historically, this option was applied by the most companies and is considered as the most conservative review strategy.
Fully automated review: Selecting this option fully automates the finance review process. Expenses that are fully approved by business managers are sent directly to the Export tab, bypassing the Review tab altogether. If the cost object or line manager auto-approval is also enabled, the expense report is automatically ready for export after a user submitted an expense report.
🚧 Caution
Take care when choosing this strategy as there is no manual check involved (not even for exceptions).
Auto-review if there are no warnings: By selecting this option, the expense report is only automatically reviewed when there are no warnings. If there are warnings, the expense goes to the Finance menu's Review tab for a manual finance review before it ends up in the Export tab. It is recommended you use this strategy if you want to automate the expense process as much as possible but still want to manually review and check outliers and exceptions.