Approving bills

Bills are not automatically submitted for approval; an approval process must be manually initiated by a user with permission to pay bills.

This would include team members with Administrator, Bill Payer, or Bill Payer (Imported Bills Only) permissions, or advisors with Super Administrator, Administrator, Manager, or Bill Payer permissions.

How to submit bills for approval

1. Sign in to your Relay account on your desktop.
2. Navigate to the Payments tab, then select Bills from the drop-down menu.
3. All unpaid bills will be listed here. Bills that have not yet been submitted for approval will be in Unpaid status.
4. You can sort by bills that have not yet been submitted for approval by clicking Status alongside the bill table's top panel. This will bring all bills in Unpaid status to the top of the table for easy visibility.
   • To learn more about filtering, searching, and sorting bills, please see Filtering, searching, and sorting bills.
5. To submit a bill for approval, click on the bill, then click Submit for Approval at the top-right corner of your screen.
6. Once this is selected, an email notification will be sent to all approvers required for the first approval step. The status for that bill will change to Awaiting approval.
7. If the approval process includes multiple steps, the approvers on subsequent steps will automatically be emailed once the previous step has been completed.

Checking a bill's approval status

1. Sign in to your Relay account on your desktop.
2. Navigate to the Payments tab, then select Bills from the drop-down menu.
3. Navigate to the Needs Approval tab at the top of the bill table. All bills that require approval will be listed here.
4. Select a bill that is in Awaiting approval status. The Approval information section at the bottom of your screen will show the approval steps required for the bill to be approved. The current step will be highlighted in orange. 

Sending approval reminders

1. Sign in to your Relay account on your desktop.
2. Follow the steps outlined in the Checking a bill's approval status section above to pull up the bill you'd like to send an approval reminder for.
3. Once you've selected the bill, click Send Reminder at the top-right corner of your screen. An email notification will be sent to all team members whose approval is requested for the current step of the approval process. 

Approving bills

If you are a bill approver, then this section is for you! Here's how you can approve a bill on Relay:

1. Sign in to your Relay account on your desktop.
2. Navigate to the bill requiring your approval. You can access the bill directly from the email notification requesting approval, or by navigating to Payments > Bills, and then selecting the bill from the list of bills awaiting approval.
3. Click Approve to approve the bill, or Reject to reject the bill. The user who submitted the bill for approval will receive a notification that the bill was approved/rejected.

After a bill has been approved

Once all approval stages have been completed, the bill can be paid by clicking Initiate Payment in the top-right corner of the bill. For detailed instructions on how to pay bills, please see Introduction to Bill Pay.

Bills can also be paid in batches; for more information on this, please see Making batch bill payments in Relay.