When an employee submits an expenses claim, the approver can be their manager, any admin or any finance user. Approvers are set by going to the Approvers section in 

Administration > Company > Settings > Expenses > Expense settings

If it is set to 'Employee manager', their manager will see a task in the workflow section of their Natural HR home screen,

and will also receive an email notification something like this

Unlike time off requests, timesheet submissions etc, HR level users are not included in the approval process for expense claims raised by an employee in their company. This means that, although there is an expense claim pending approval, the HR user will not see it in their workflow area on their home screen. 

For some businesses, this can be an issue if the employee's manager is on holiday or off sick, there is no one available to approve the employee's expense claim.

Although HR users can not approve expense claims by default, it is possible to create a custom workflow to include HR users who are then able to approve or decline the expense claim. 

To create a custom workflow go to

Administration > HR > Workflows

Clicking on the 'Add' button you can create an Approval workflow for Expenses

This workflow only requires a single step that requires approval

There are different options for how you want to include HR as an Approver, this first option includes members of the HR mailbox as a recipient of the workflow notice that will appear on their Natural HR home screen.

Setting the recipients to be both the employee's manager and members of the HR mailbox means that the manager will see the approval request as a workflow notice on their Natural HR home screen,

and so will a member of the HR mailbox.

If the manager approves the expense claim then the expense claim approval workflow notice will be removed from the HR user home screen. Alternately, if the manager is unable to approve the expense claim due to absence, then the HR level user can approve the claim via the workflow notice on their home screen, and the workflow notice on the manager's home screen will be removed.

Please note: using this method, the HR user will see all expense claims pending approval.

You may not wish your HR users to see all pending expense claims, in this case then, the recipient of the workflow step will just be the employee's manager.

In this case, the HR mailbox will receive an email notification as part of an escalation, here we have set the escalation to 5 days. The manager will see the expense claim approval notice on their home screen as above, however in this example, if the manager does not approve or decline the expense claim within 5 days

the HR mailbox members will receive an email like this. The HR user can click on the 'Action Now' button, and after logging in to Natural HR

the HR level user can then review the claim and Approve or Decline as appropriate. The workflow notice on the manager's home screen will also be removed.