Bill Payments - 2 stage approval process for online bill payment
Online Bill Payments - Can this please have better security applied to it, requiring 2 approvers to release funds. The current design with a single approver to release funds in the Australian version goes against a lot of company governance policies requiring 2 approvers to release payments. Otherwise, how is Xero preventing a user creating a fraudulent bill, approving it and paying it without needing anyone else to be involved.
Jessica Reinders
shared this idea
Hi everyone, thanks for taking the time to share your feedback on this idea. We can understand why having a two-stage approval process for online bill payments could be useful for businesses with internal approval policies or multiple people involved in authorising payments.
I've updated the status of this idea to Gaining Support so we can continue to track interest from the community.
As we gather feedback, it would also be helpful to understand how you'd like this to work in practice. For example, should approvals be based on payment value, specific users or roles, or support multiple approval levels? If you have particular approval workflows or controls that are important for your business, please share them below.
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Karola Pribranszki
commented
Currently our payment process requires 2 approvals and the only we can make this work, is having the first approval on Xero or sometimes via emails (unfortunately, some approvers only need to access Xero for approving bills but nothing else, so sometimes they provide email approvals which makes audit trail more complex and requires additional administration attaching copies of emails to Xero),
and the second approval on the bank.
Due to this issue, we are not able to use the automatic payment function, and payments must be uploaded to the bank manually for additional authorisation before payment is made.Having additional approval levels in Xero would be a huge improvement, including easy access to bills/expenses backup without the need for the Approver to login both to Xero and the bank when authorising payments.
We'd like to have a feature to be able to set up approval levels based on payment value, specific users/roles, potentially based on the Suppliers, having at least 2 levels of approval per transaction.
This would allow us:
- to use Xero as our main platform of communication and processing payments for all approvers involved;
- to utilise automatic bank payments via direct bank access after final approvals;
- to change and simplify bank authorisation system, which is currently a huge bottleneck in our payment process;
- to have a flawless audit trail of approvals and reduce administration burder. -
Kerry Smolarek
commented
For our business, we just need a second person to verify the payment/s. Our payments can vary greatly in amount, so a limit on value is not required.