Review Expenses with automatic rules

Take full control of your company spend with Expense Review, a powerful new feature that eliminates manual bottlenecks and enforces your policies in real time.

Now you can review expenses within Clara or escalate card transactions based on rules tailored to your team’s needs. Whether you’re looking to identify out-of-policy spend, streamline month-end reviews, or improve tax compliance, this feature helps you stay in control over your corporate spending.

⚠️ Please consider that this feature DO NOT affect the transaction clearance status. It only has effect in the expense review, so that companies can keep compliance with their specific expense policy. If you want to learn more about transaction status click here. 
 

What are Expense Review Rules and why should I use them?

Expense Review Rules allow you to have specific reviewing workflows to approve or reject a transaction. You can set up either an automatic or a manual review workflow depending on card transactions criteria or conditions. 

By using these rules, you will eliminate manual effort to have all spending approved by the end of month, you will enforce compliance with the Corporate Spend Policy in real time and your company can increase tax deductibility.

How do I set up a new rule for Expense Review?

Admins are the only ones who can create these rules:

1. Go to Movements > Settings ⚙️

If this is the first time, you can enable this feature from here. Once you do it, you will arrive at a screen with all the rules. You will see a General approval workflow by default. This rule is set by default

2. Click on “+ Create workflow”
3. Start by typing a name and a description: this will allow you to identify the rule easily
4. Select transaction conditions (e.g. amount over $200, transaction merchant is Facebook) and then click on Save and Continue (take into account that you aggregate multiple conditions, so that the rule is more specific). You can build rules using one or more of the following parameters:
   1. Transaction amount 
   2. Merchant Name/Category
   3. Cardholder Name/Role
   4. Cardholder Group
   5. Cardholder Location
   6. Card Type
5. Choose a review workflow: Here you can select from automatic or manual review. 
   1. Use Auto-approve or Auto-reject for controlled expenses that won’t affect the overall monthly spending
   2. Use Add approver layer for increased control of monthly spending. In this case you can select up to 5 levels of reviews and you can customize each level with up to five selections. You can choose either by the direct manager, a specific user, a role, a member from the group or a member from a location
6. Once you’re done, click on Save and Create Flow

7. Once you have created all your rules, you can sort them in the preferred order by dragging and dropping. This will provide priority to each of the rules, so that every card transaction follows rules under that order.

⚠️ Once a rule is active, transactions happening from that moment will be handled accordingly. Rules do not work retroactively with past transactions. We suggest creating these rules in a moment where transactions have low traffic and at the initial days of a new cycle.

 

How can I review transactions?

Depending on the manual workflow review, any user is eligible to review transactions. Reviewers can review from two main sections:

1. From the Tasks section in Web
   1. Go to Tasks > Card Transactions
   2. Here you will be able to see all transactions where you are eligible to review
   3. Click on Approve or Reject as preferred
   4. If Reject, leave a message to enforce current Expense Policy

2. From the Movements section in Web
   1. Go to Movements and check the review status in the Expense Review column
   2. Filter by My pending review to see transactions that needs your review
   3. Then navigate across transactions and click on Approve or Reject as preferred
   4. If Reject, leave a message to enforce current Expense Policy

⚠️ Reviewing is only available in web for the moment. In the Clara App, users can track their review workflow progress in real time in each transaction detail screen.