Speed up spend approval and review process with in-platform comments

Poor communication is the bane of many employees' lives, with 86% of employees citing lack of effective communication as one of the main causes of workplace failures.

If you and your finance team simplify spend via a spend management solution but have to exchange slacks, emails, and WhatsApps elsewhere to get any context for approvals. Then, you're probably facing a lot of delays and misalignment.

Let's look at a typical purchase order process as an example:

Say you're awaiting stakeholder signoff for a purchase order. You've chased them twice via email. They responded a few days later via Slack, saying they wanted to return the expense with changes. For example, 'the future expense (related to the purchase) will need to be split between two departments in your company.' Now, you have to log back into your spend management system, switching back and forth between your software and your Slack channel to ensure the changes made are correct.

This communication approach is not only tedious, but it's now led to a lack of action from the approver, resulting in possible delays with raising the PO and, respectively, sending it to the supplier to receive the goods or services required

That's why we've introduced a brand new in-platform comments feature at Payhawk. The new feature speeds up invoice, expense, and purchase order approvals and reviews.

Three big benefits of our in-platform comments upgrade

1. Improves collaboration

With new comments and tags, you and your finance and non-finance coworkers can now communicate seamlessly about spending. This feature helps everyone stay informed and updated on expense and invoice statuses without leaving the Payhawk platform.
Goodbye, miscommunication, unnecessary delays, and missed deadlines due to lack of info or approval.

2. Enhances transparency and accountability

When you tag relevant employees, the built-in audit log saves it, meaning everyone can see who you’ve tagged and your comments. This vastly improves transparency and accountability across the organisation.

Now, with more transparency in your spend approval process, you can maintain compliance with policies and regulations. You can also ensure stakeholders stay aware of relevant expense and invoice statuses, improving spend control and visibility.

3. Streamlines the entire approval and review process

Approvers need the right information to approve an expense request before it goes to accounts payable. There might be a lot of back-and-forth to clarify certain request details, but our new feature means that’s no longer an issue. Our commenting and tagging feature simplifies the approval process and ensures everyone can access the info they need (without relying on outside communication tools).

Streamline, speed up, and improve your spend approval process with in-platform comment

Our new feature ensures your spend approval and review process is free from unnecessary hassle. In our platform, you can now:

• Communicate within the app through comments and tag relevant people
• Receive expense management notifications directly in your Payhawk inbox instead of having to check your emails or messaging app
• Get access to the activity log of all expense-related updates (history, changes, workflows, comments)

With in-app communication, you can now comment on expenses and purchase requests and tag people to ensure important review tasks don't go unnoticed — all without leaving the platform (all available on our portal and the mobile app.

The screenshot below shows what the in-app comments look like, including visible tags to eliminate confusion where possible.

No more checking your email or Slack channels for replies, as you'll receive notifications directly in your Payhawk inbox and mobile app, keeping everything spend-related under one roof.

We've also revamped the audit logs and combined comments, workflows, and updates within the activity tab at both the expense and purchase levels. The example below shows the drop-down filter, which helps you quickly sift through your activity log, perfectly streamlining your spend approval process.

Does it sound good? And look even better? Get ready to eliminate poor spend approval communications — talk to one of our experts to see our expense management tools in action, or request a personalised demo.