How to Set Up Direct Manager Approvals

What are direct manager approvals?
With direct manager approvals, you have the ability in Rho to automatically route employee expenses up the direct manager approval chain (to your manager and/or your manager's manager), assigned both in Rho or via your HRIS integration.

By combining direct manager approvals with $ amount tiers (e.g. require manager approval for expenses above $50 and CFO approval for expenses above $300 amount), you can create multi-level approval flows that reflect your organization's unique structure with Rho.

Defining the manager relationship

Direct Managers can be assigned easily through User Management > Assign Managers.

Tip: We recommend exporting your organizational structure from an HRIS, or similar system.

Once the file is processed, any errors will be flagged. To fix them, make the corrections on the file, and try uploading again. Managers can also be updated individually via the User Management page.

Configuring your approval policy

First, enable Expense Approvals by going to organization name > Organization Settings > Payment Security > Expense Approvals.

Next, start adding approvers. Each tier represents a dollar-amount threshold for which an approver, or approvers will get notified to approve for.

Direct managers can be assigned solo to a tier, or can be combined with a static user. When multiple approvers are in a tier, any one of them can approve or reject.

Configure a Default Approver

If direct managers are added to the approval policy, we will route expenses to whomever is defined as the submitting user’s manager.

In the event there is no direct manager we can use, the expense will be routed to the Default Approver. Here are examples in which the Default Approver might come into the picture:

• There are three levels of direct manager approvals. A Sales VP whose only manager is the CEO submits an expense
  • Route: CEO -> Default Approver
• A new employee does not yet have a direct manager assigned to them, and submits an expense
  • Route: Default Approver
• A direct manager’s email was incorrect in the CSV file and hasn’t been fixed. Their direct report submits an expense
  • Route: Default Approver

Only one default approver can be configured at a time.

Sample paths:

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