What are payment approvals?

What are payment approvals?

Payment approvals are any payments that are routed to the Administrator, an Authorized User enabled as a payment administrator or selected additional users for approval before being sent to the payee.¹

Who can send payments for approval? 

Any user on the account can optionally add approvers when sending payments. See the section below on sending payments and adding approvers.

The Administrator and any Authorized Users with payment administrator permissions² can send payments without needing any approval. You can edit a previously-added authorized user’s payment administrator permissions by navigating to the Settings icon in the upper right-hand corner of your dashboard and then selecting the Approvals & Account Access tab.

Note: Any Accountant or Contributor users you’ve added will automatically have payments routed for approval based on their permissions and cannot be edited to have payment administrator permissions.

For more information on managing your additional users, check out this support article.

Adding approvers to payments

1. Sign in to your Bluevine dashboard
2. Navigate to Payments on the left-hand menu
   • You can also navigate to Bills and select Pay next to a bill you’d like to create a payment for
3. Select Send Payment 
4. Search for your payee and select them
   • You can also add a new payee manually from here
   • For more information on adding a payee, check out our adding a payee support article
5. Select which account you would like to pay from on the Pay from drop-down menu
   • Here, you can choose from your main and sub-accounts, external bank accounts, or credit and debit cards that have been added to the account
6. Insert the payment amount and bill details
7. Choose the payment method, frequency, and the send date
8. Select Add approver
   • Note: Any final approvers will be shown as the final level of approval on this screen if you’re an Authorized User (not a payment administrator on the account), Accountant, or Contributor
      
9. Select Any or All under the “Require” dropdown menu
   • If you select Any, only one of the selected individuals must approve the payment prior to it moving forward
   • If you select All, all of the selected individuals must approve the payment prior to it moving forward (in no particular order)
10. Select the checkbox next to which users you’d like to add as an approver under the “Approver” heading
    
    • If you’d like to delete the approver level, click the “X” icon
11. Repeat steps 3-5 if you’d like to add additional approver levels. You can add up to 3 levels, in addition to the final approver level
12. Select Next once all required approvers have been added to the payment
13. Confirm that all payment details and payment approvers look correct on the confirmation screen, then select Send for review

For information on payments, visit our articles on ACH payments, wire payments, and Bill Pay

How do I approve payments?

Follow the steps below to approve, deny, or view payments that have been sent for your approval:

1. Sign in to your Bluevine dashboard
   • You’ll receive an email with the subject line “You have pending payments for review”. In this email, you can hit Sign in to review and be routed to the payment approvals screen (step 3)
2. Select the bell icon located on the top right-hand corner of your dashboard
   
3. Locate the ‘Pending approvals’ section and select View payments

4. Review the payments that are listed
   
5. Check the box next to the payments you’d like to approve
   • You can view more details about a payment by selecting the three dots next to the payment and then clicking View
   • You can deny a payment by selecting the three dots next to the payment and click Deny
     • The sender of the payment will be notified via email that the payment has been denied. 
   • Any payments that will arrive past the due date will be flagged on the pending approval screen
6. Select Approve Payments once you’ve selected all you’d like to approve
   • If you didn’t select the checkbox next to a payment, no action will be taken once you select Approve Payments, and it will remain in the ‘Pending approvals’ section
   • Recurring payments only need to be approved once 
7. If prompted, complete the Multi Factor Authentication (MFA) requirement
8. Click Done on the ‘Payments approved’ screen.
   • If there are insufficient funds in your Bluevine account to cover an immediate payment, you’ll receive a pop-up notifying you. Select Go back to unselect any payments.
   • If there is a payment you’d like to cancel after approving it, please contact us and we’ll be happy to look into it for you. For any payments scheduled for a future date, you can delete them by navigating to Payments on your dashboard

Note: If a payment has been pending review for more than 60 days, the system will automatically cancel it and trigger an email to the next approver(s) the payment was waiting on.  

1: This feature is only available on the desktop version of the Bluevine Dashboard and not the Bluevine mobile app.

2: Customers are fully responsible for all activity and actions taken by any Additional User, as well as adherence to all terms and conditions. Bluevine and its partners are not responsible for any Additional User action or activity.