Navigating approvals

To increase visibility and oversight over outgoing funds (including external transfers and when paying bills), you can use approval rules to:

Set amount-based thresholds for payment approvals
Assign specific and/or multiple team members as approvers
- Add a department lead as an approver step in your approval rules
Limit how much a team member can send in a day
Require dual admin approvals for sensitive actions
Prevent users from approving payments they initiated by enabling separation of duties

To get started, head to Settings > Approvals or read on to learn more.

Per-payment approvals

Per-payment approvals let you require review before a payment is sent, based on the payment amount. This ensures the team members approve transactions before funds leave your account. You can even create multiple rules with custom thresholds and stack them for multi-level review.

How they work

Rules apply when a payment meets or exceeds the set amount (depending on how the rule is set up)
If multiple rules apply, all required approvers must review the payment
If the requester is also an approver, they’re skipped and count toward approval by default unless you have separation of duties enabled

Setting up per-payment approvals

Click your org name in the top-left hand corner of your dashboard and click Settings > Approvals
Under "Per-payment approvals", click + Create rule to get started or Edit to stack existing rules
Configure dollar amounts and required approvers (Any Admin, department lead, or choose a specific team member)
Click Save

Note: Only admins can edit or remove approval rules. Changes apply to all new payments after the update.

Department approvals

You can add a department lead as an approver step in a rule. Rather than assigning a specific person, select Department lead as the approver type — approval routes automatically to the lead of whatever department is tagged on the payment.

Payments with no department tag, or tagged to a department with no assigned lead, will skip department approval — all other rules still apply
Department leads don't need banking access to approve — they can hold any role, including Employee
Department leads can see recipient info and non-sensitive account details for payments they're asked to approve

A note on account access: Designated team members can only approve payments from accounts they have access to, unless they are a department lead. When a payment is submitted, Mercury checks that at least one approver can access the funding account. If no assigned approvers have access to the funding account, the payment can’t be approved and may be blocked.

Daily maximum

Set a daily limit on the total amount a team member can send, ensuring any payments exceeding the amount set requires approval.

This means if a team member’s cumulative payments (including any pending payments) exceed the daily maximum, additional payments will need to be reviewed before they are sent.

Both Payment Approvals and Daily Maximum rules can coexist. If a payment already requires review under a per-payment rule, the Daily Maximum will not add another approval. Instead, it acts as a safety net — ensuring users can't send many smaller payments under the per-payment threshold without oversight (though this should be unusual).

Admins reviewing Payment approvals would also satisfy the “Any Admin” approvers on the Daily Maximum rule. Admins can act as approvers. If the payment requester is also an assigned approver, they’ll be skipped in the approval process and count as an approver.

Dual admin approvals

If you have multiple admins on your team, this setting requires that two admins approve certain requests.

You'll need two admins on file before you can enable the policy. If you're currently the only admin, you'll need to either invite a new team member or update permissions for an existing team member.

Actions initiated by an admin will require one other admin to approve and all other roles require two admins to approve each request.

Requests that require additional approvals include:

Managing team members with elevated permissions
- Inviting or removing an Admin
- Changing an Admin’s role
- Inviting a user with send money permissions
- Granting send money permissions to an existing user
Resetting 2-factor-authentication
Enabling or editing approval rules

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