Every submitted travel request has to be approved before it can be booked. Approvers are not roles or tiers — they are a list of named people, in order, stored on the requester's own user record. This article covers what happens to your request and what an approver sees.
How the Chain Works
Each employee has an ordered Approval Chain configured on their user record in Administration > User Management. Approver 1 must approve before approver 2, and so on. There are no value thresholds and no automatic escalation: the same chain applies to a R2,000 trip and a R200,000 trip.
If no chain is configured for the requester, organization administrators act as the fallback approvers. Nobody can approve or reject their own request.
Tracking Your Request
Open Requests > All Requests and click the view icon on a request. The status filter on that list offers Draft, Pending Approval, Approved, Booking in Progress, Booked, Rejected, and Cancelled. On a longer chain you may also see an intermediate status such as Level 1 approved while the request waits for the next approver.
The detail page shows an Approval History list — who acted, when, and the comment they left. When the request is fully approved, the status card offers a Book Now button.
Approving or Rejecting a Request
If you are an approver, work from Requests > Approvals. The page has two tabs: Pending My Approval (requests where you are the current approver) and Actioned by Me. You can search and filter by priority, which is derived from the estimated cost rather than set by the requester.
- Select a request to see its details, travellers, budget, and history.
- Choose Approve or Reject to open the action modal.
- Add comments. They are optional for an approval and required for a rejection — a rejection reason shorter than 10 characters is refused by the server.
- Optionally add a digital signature; the requester is notified separately when an approval is signed.
Approving out of turn is blocked: if you are in the chain but it is not your step, you are told which position you hold.
When a Request Is Rejected
The requester receives an in-app notification containing the rejection reason, and the reason is also visible in the Approval History on the request. A rejected request cannot be edited or resubmitted — the edit action is only offered for draft and pending requests. To try again, create a new request that addresses the feedback.