Payout Approvals

Paytm Payouts ensure that every fund movement from the dashboard can be monitored and administered at different levels. It has an in-built approval workflow where every transaction for payout, bill payment or vendor invoicing can be linked to an approval process. The admin or a concerned higher authority can be set as an approver for accepting or rejecting the transaction.

Paytm Payouts not only helps in automating payout disbursals but also creates a workflow process as every business needs approvals at various stages before any expense is paid. Approval workflow enables the business to add multiple checkpoints from different stakeholders before any payment. 

The ‘Approvals’ section from the left menu can be used by approvers to view all the outstanding approvals and their details. Approver will be able to approve or reject transactions from this section. 

Before an approval workflow is created, users and roles should be added from the Payouts dashboard. The administrator needs to identify team members in the organization who can be added to the Paytm Payouts dashboard to manage their allocated roles in the workflow. These members are called Users. Users can be assigned roles. A Role is a set of permissions to perform operations like Approve a transaction, Add a bill etc.

Pre-requisites to an Approval Workflow

For creating an approval workflow, the primary step is to add a ‘User’ to the Paytm Payouts Dashboard.

1. The Admin User can add a new User from the ‘Manage Users & Roles’ section under the ‘Settings’ menu on the left main menu.
2. Go to the ‘User’ tab, then click the ‘Add New User’ button and follow the instructions. The Admin can also Edit or Delete a User.
3. The next step is to ‘Create a Role’. Alternately, the Admin can choose one of the in-built Roles from the dashboard if that meets the exact requirements.
4. And lastly, the chosen Role needs to be associated with the User to enable the functionality of that role for that specific User Id.
    

💡 Tip
The Admin user has a full set of permissions. The  sub-users can be associated with one or more default and custom roles.

Standard Roles

1. In the left main menu under ‘Settings’ options, go to the ‘Manage Users & Roles’. 
2. Select the ‘Roles’ tab. Under the 'Roles' tab, you will find ‘Product’, ‘Stores’ and ‘Payout Account’.
3. Payout Account tab has the built in permissions for fund transfer operation from the Payout Account and Disbursal Accounts. Standard roles can be used or new roles can be created to delegate permissions to users for making and approving payments from payout and disbursal accounts.

Below are a list of  standard roles and permissions associated to each

Associate a User to a Role

The final step to put an approval workflow in action is to associate a ‘User to a ‘Role’. 

1. A new user can be added from the ‘Users’ tab in the 'Manage Users & Roles' section under the 'Settings' Menu.
2. Click the ‘Add New User’ button.

   💡 Tip
   The role of an existing user can also be edited, i.e more roles can be associated or existing associated roles can be removed from a user account. This can be done by clicking on the existing user from the list view and starting to edit.

3. ‘Payout Accounts’ tab under the ‘Manage Users & Roles’ section displays all the disbursal accounts created by the merchant and its associated users in a list view.

   Note: The user who has created the account, i.e the account maker is by default associated with the account.

4. Click the Disbursal Account from the list view to edit it further i.e add more users, delete old users, and change the roles for the associated users, etc.
5. To set permissions for disbursal of funds and to associate more users, click the ✎ (edit icon) on the top.
6. To associate more users to this Disbursal Account, click the ‘Add New User’.
7. Select the user and the respective role to be allocated.
8. Click 'Save Users’ to save the new actions performed on the account. The approvals workflow is created for the chosen payout or disbursal account. The fund flow will hence move with respect to the user flow rule defined here.

Note: Only the main Administrator for the Paytm Payouts account can add a new User. To delegate this task further to any user(s), the administrator has to permit the user to add/edit/delete any other user.

The approvals flow can be set for all types of fund movement, i.e. payment transactions from payout account and disbursal accounts, bill payments, expenses, payout links and vendor invoices. The status of every type of payout is available in the ‘Approvals’ section in the left main menu.

Payouts

This section records every approval request for Payout transactions. Payout transactions, whether in single or in bulk format can be from a Payouts Account or any Disbursal Account. The flow of funds from Payouts Account to any specific disbursal account can also be checked by setting approval flow.

Bills

The approval requests for all bill payment transactions are recorded in this section. Both bulk and single bill payment transactions can be approved from this section.

Vendor Invoices

The approval requests for all vendor invoices payouts are recorded in this section. Both bulk and single vendor invoice payouts can be approved from this section.

Payout Links

The approval requests for all payout links payouts are recorded in this section. Both bulk and single payout link payouts can be approved from this section.

Expenses

The approval requests for all expenses payouts are recorded in this section. Expenses payouts can be approved from this section.
 

To approve or reject any payouts, follow the steps below:

1. On the left main menu, click the ‘Approvals’ under the 'Payouts' section.
2. Select the type of payout for which approval action has to be taken. The transaction type can be ‘Payouts’, ‘Bill’, ‘Vendor Invoices’, ‘Payout links’ and ‘Expenses’.
   The ‘Single Transfer’ tab shows the approval request for single payouts and ‘Bulk Transfer’ shows approval requests for transactions done through file upload.
3. Use the 'Duration' and 'Status' filter to optimize the search results.
4. Select the payout transactions to take ‘Approve’ or ‘Reject’ action. ‘Approve’ or ‘Reject’ options for each transaction are available for the approver user.
5.  

Note: The user who initiates a transaction can see the status of the request from the  'Transaction History' section in the left main menu.