Empower Your Team with Dynamic Approvals

Screenshot of a task in Center.

By The Center Team on August 16, 2021

With Center’s Dynamic Approvals, there’s no need to choose between empowering employees to spend and keeping that spend within company guidelines.

When it comes to managing expenses, one of the biggest challenges for finance teams is how to empower employees to spend while ensuring that employee spend fits within company guidelines. In the past, this has forced companies to make a choice between ease of use and control

Organizations who optimize for ease of use often end up with little to no approval oversight on expenses. Most traditional expense management tools don’t make it easy to set up sophisticated approvals, so employees are largely trusted to stay within company guidelines on their own, even if that means the occasional wayward spend. The issue is that as a company scales, the volume of expenses scales with it, and expenses can quickly spiral out of control.

Organizations who optimize for control typically end up with burdensome expense approval processes that are tough to implement and even tougher to follow. These companies often end up paying too much for complex expense management software. And these expensive solutions can also be surprisingly difficult to customize. As a result, any changes in approval policies can cost thousands of dollars in professional services fees and take weeks to execute.

We believe you should be able to have ease of use and control, and that these should be free. Center’s Dynamic Approvals and My Approvals features adapt to your organization’s unique way of managing expenses, allowing you to solve even the most complex expense management challenges.

Dynamic Approvals

Easily and flexibly manage unique approval flows for your business.

  • Categorize expenses on your terms (e.g. cost center, project #, amount)
  • Route any expense to as many approvers as you need, based on the rules you create
  • Automatically approve expenses based on any property of the expense—for example, expenses under $25

How do Dynamic Approvals work in practice? If your business manages spend based on projects, for example, you can easily route expenses for a particular project to a specific approver. If your business requires your controller to sign off any monthly software expenditures over $1,000, you can route the expense to the spender’s manager first, and then to the controller.

You can even reduce the volume of transactions requiring manager approval by automatically approving specific expense types or those below defined dollar amounts. We’ve made it extremely simple to create, prioritize, and manage these approval rules. If you’ve ever used custom filters to search for a flight online, you can manage approval rules in Center.

 

custom approval rules

 

My Approvals

Easily review and approve departmental expenses.

  • See all expenses that need approval in one location, including those flagged as policy violations
  • Approve expenses in real time, without having to wait for the month-end close
  • Bulk approve expenses that clear Center’s audit review

This new dashboard makes it easier than ever to approve expenses by highlighting out-of-policy expenses and allowing bulk approval of in-policy expenses. This allows approvers to focus only on the expenses that most need review.

 

my approvals

 

Center’s Dynamic Approvals and My Approvals features provide all the control you need in a simple user experience, helping you save time and eliminate errors. The days of needing to choose between control and ease of use are over.

Nik Singh is Center’s vice president of product management. He and his team are working on new ways to streamline, automate, and optimize the entire expense management process, from spending and expensing through closing the books and analyzing data. 

Want to see Center in action? Watch the Dynamic Approvals video demo now.