Auto-Approval Rules

Automating approval of routine, low-risk expense claims delivers significant time savings for organizations with high submission volumes. HLF explicitly required automatic approval for claims under 50 km or without receipts, recognizing that manual review of every minor claim creates unnecessary bottlenecks. Configurable rules allow each organization to encode its own reimbursement policy - HLF's kilometer threshold differs from Blindeforbundet's driver honorarium rules - without requiring code changes per tenant. Reducing wait times on routine reimbursements also improves peer mentor satisfaction and volunteer retention, which is a stated concern across multiple organizations in the source workshops.

Rules are stored as organization-scoped records with typed condition fields (amount_lte, distance_lte, receipt_required, expense_type_whitelist). On expense submission, a rule evaluation service checks the claim against all active rules for the organization; a match sets status to approved immediately. The admin rules page provides a form-based builder with live validation and conflict detection. Evaluation logic lives in a shared service layer called by both the REST submission endpoint and any future batch re-evaluation job, keeping behavior consistent. All auto-approvals are written to the audit log with the matched rule ID for traceability.