In case you need to be on top of all your expense submissions, and do not want all your logged expenses to be approved without verification, Productive offers the option to switch on the expense approval flow.
This will allow the budget owners to receive expense approval notifications and approve, reject or edit the expense submissions coming from people working on budgets and sales deals.
Expense approval is available on the Ultimate subscription plan.
Turning on Expense Approval in Account Settings
To enable expense approval for your account:
Go to Settings > Expenses (required to turn the feature on).
Optionally, go to Settings > Budget to make expense approvals the default for all new budgets.
Toggle on Expense approval and click Save at the bottom.
📌 You’ll need admin, owner, or custom expense permissions to change these settings.
Turning on Expense Approval in a Budget
After enabling expense approvals in Settings > Expenses, you can decide which budgets actually need them. To enable expense approval for a specific budget:
Open the budget sidebar.
Go to the Settings tab (⚙️).
Toggle on Expense approval.
Once enabled, submitted expenses show up in the budget owner’s Approvals inbox for review.
Delivering the Budget Without Approving All Expenses
If you enable the "Allow delivering this budget with unapproved or rejected expenses" option, the budget can be delivered even if there are pending (unapproved) or rejected expenses.
Here’s how different scenarios affect cost and billable amounts in your budgets:
Approved expenses generate both a cost and a billable amount (budget used).
Unapproved expenses generate a cost but do not generate a billable amount (budget used).
Rejected expenses do not generate a cost or a billable amount (budget used).
📌 Note: For expenses linked to non-billable services, no billable amount (budget used) will be generated in any of these scenarios.
You can set this option as the default for all budgets by navigating to Settings > Budget > Expenses Settings Defaults. Otherwise, you'll need to enable it manually for each budget.
Submitting Expense Approval Requests
Once you've set up expense approval in both the account and budget settings, and confirmed expense tracking is enabled for the services in the budget, users can submit their expenses for approval.
👉 Check out this article on submitting expenses for more details.
Receiving an Expense Approval Request
From the budget owner's perspective, after users submit expenses, the budget owner will receive an approval notification and see the request in their approvals screen.
At that point, the budget owner can approve the expense, flagging it as Approved (✔️), or reject the expense by adding an explanatory note, marking it as Rejected (Ⓧ), edit the expense, and even delete it through the three-dot menu on the right.
📌 Tip: Only budget owners get notifications for expense submissions, but Admins and Managers can still review and approve them in the budget’s Expenses tab using the Approval field.
Expense Request Notifications
Make sure the Expense notifications in your Settings > Notifications have been turned on to ensure that everyone (the expense submitter and budget owner, or approver) is aware of the most recent updates and changes to the expenses.
The expense submitter will receive an email notification (not in-app!) if you, the budget owner and expense approver, request any changes before approving the expense.
The "View expense" button allows them to quickly access the mentioned expense from their inbox, make changes, update the expense and return it for approval.
You, as the approver, will receive another email as a result, informing you that you need to check some unapproved expenses.
Expenses Overview
Navigate to Financials > Expenses to access the company's expense list.
Use filters, fields and views to easily identify expenses that require reimbursement or further attention (e.g. add the "Approval status" field to oversee all expense statuses, from approved, changes requested, approval not required, and even canceled).
In the Reports section, choose the Expenses data source for a comprehensive view of submitted expenses and bring it to your home dashboard as a widget in case you need to monitor expense requests and their statuses more frequently!
