Make your outgoing transfers recurrent and create validation workflows for your team

Companies that manage their bank accounts collaboratively must find a balance between trust and control, especially when it comes to outgoing bank transfers. Who should be in charge? Up to which point? Our clients have already made tons of bank transfers—without paying tons of banking fees on them—and today, we’re adding two transfers-related features:

1. recurring transfers
2. team-wide validation workflows.

Never miss a payment again thanks to recurring transfers

Recurring bank transfers repeat themselves automatically, based on the frequency you choose This allows you to set them once and forget about them after that. With recurring transfers, you can create a series of forthcoming bank transfers in just a few clicks.

When creating a new recurring bank transfer, you can choose:

• the frequency: weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually;
• the day: for example "every Monday“, “the 28th of every month“, or “every year, on the 14th of December";
• the ending date (optional): if you want your recurring bank transfer to stop after a given date.

Once set up, your recurring bank transfers will show up in your "Upcoming" tab, where you’ll also find their frequency and amount. But recurrent doesn’t mean “set in stone”. Your plans have changed? No problem. Stopping a recurring transfer is as easy as creating a new one. When you delete an existing recurring transfer, this means that all the outgoing transfers that were yet to be sent in the series will never see the light of day.

Control your outgoing transfer flow using validation workflows

Your team members can create transfer requests, which then need to be validated by an admin for the transfer to get sent out. But what if you want your team to be in charge of outgoing transfers from start to finish up until a given amount (per transfer)? Or what if you want significant outgoing transfers to be confirmed not just by one, but by two admins? Our new validation workflows will enable you to do just that. You can require more validations when you need them and you can let your team be in charge up to a certain point.

Each validation workflow requires three parameters for it to work:

1. A kicker threshold, to set a limit above which each outgoing transfer needs to be validated by an admin, for example "this workflow gets triggered for every transfer above 10,000€".
2. One or more owners, to define which admin needs to take part in a given workflow.
3. Validation steps, to create cascading validations if needed, with one or several admins assigned to each step. For example, "the first validation should come from one admin (any admin) and the second validation should come from the VP of Finance (and nobody else)".

Think of validation workflows as a way to draw a line between outgoing transfers that require validation (from an admin) and transfers that can be 100% managed by your team. For the time being, all users are subject to validation workflows and only admins can confirm validation steps.

Switching from transfer requests to validation workflows

How do validation workflows fit with transfer requests? Think of it as a classic case of before/after.

Before, with transfer requests, the fate of any outgoing transfer would hinge upon the role of each user:

• Most collaborators had to perform transfer requests for 100% of their outgoing transfers. They had no autonomy at all.
• Some collaborators were in charge of all their own outgoing transfers, from end to end. They enjoyed total autonomy.

Now, with validation workflows, the fate of any outgoing transfer hinges upon its amount:

• Some outgoing transfers can be taken care of by the collaborators who are allowed to perform bank transfers—you can still prevent any collaborator from initiating new outgoing transfers.
• Some outgoing transfers now need to be validated by one or several admins, regardless of the permissions granted to the users who initiated each transfer.

To help our clients switch from transfer requests to validation workflows, we created a first validation workflow on the Memo Bank workspace of companies that were using transfer requests. This validation workflow is triggered when an outgoing transfer’s amount exceeds 0€ and any admin can validate it—there’s only one validation step in that workflow. You can either delete or edit this rule as you please. To find your validation workflows, just navigate to the "validation rule" tab in your company settings.

Works even when your teammates aren’t

To prevent your validation workflows from grinding to a halt when the admins in charge take some time off, you can attach several admins to any given validation step. Within any validation workflow, you can then create something like:

1. I want Yoko OR John to validate the first step of the workflow.
2. Then I want a second validation by either Liam OR Noel.
3. Finally, I want any admin to be able to validate the third (and last) step of the workflow.

That way, if John is out of office, Yoko can still take care of the first step of the workflow. And should Liam take some time off, Noel could step in.

Tailor your validation rules to your need

If you want to fine-tune your validation workflows depending on the amount of each and every bank transfer, you may create several validation rules. For example:

• Between 0 and 10,000€: no validation rule here, your team can handle outgoing transfers from start to finish, without admin supervision.
• Between 10,000€ and 50,000€: apply validation rule A, with its proper threshold, steps, and owners.
• For bank transfers above 50,000€: apply validation rule B, with its own threshold, steps, and owners.

Get started today

Recurring transfers and validation workflows are available starting now. If you already have a Memo Bank account, you can take advantage of them, at no extra cost—except for our Basic plan, which isn’t a team plan. And if you’d like to open a Memo Bank account for your business, schedule a call with one of our bankers. It’s free.