[Account Owner] Setting up Conditional Advanced Approvals

Advanced Approvals allow firms to customize the approval process with multi-condition rules to ensure that only high-risk or specific transactions are routed for manual Home Office review, while low-risk engagements can be auto-processed.

The process works with selected engagements or client currency based on specific data triggers (e.g fee amounts or client currency attributes) and routes them for manual Home Office review. Account Owners and their Admins will not trigger this approval process.

In addition, the client attribute currency works in coordination with the Advance Approvals feature. Only the client currency attributes type can be used in the rules. Please ensure this currency attribute is set up to proceed and use conditional advanced approvals.

How it works

Conditional Advanced approvals allow rules will be established by the firm's Home office with up to 3 conditions.  These will then be applied to engagements with total engagement fees and/or the client currency attribute. When an advisor or their admin submits an Engagement, the approval will move the request through your firm’s rules and the active logic conditions that are set up:

• The system evaluates rules from top to bottom. The first rule condition met dictates the exact path the invoice will take.
• If there are no triggers for specialized conditional rules, it defaults to your firm's baseline approval setting.
• If you already have TEF approvals on existing workflows before enabling Conditional Advanced Approvals, those rules will be waiting for you on the rules page.
• Lastly, once the rules are set up, you'll need to navigate to your Firm Settings, then to the TEF Engagement (s) and use the dropdown to select all active rules to apply. (The dropdown is not adjustable for the desired outcome).  Please note you can select none, one, or many of the rules, but when adding the rules, they must make sense and work together, as the system won't check this process.

Key capabilities and how to use them

To configure your rules, navigate to the bottom left sidebar to Guardrails > Rules. Next, ensure you're currently using or already have established a Total Engagement Fee and a client currency attribute. These will be used in the conditions for the rules to trigger the need for approval.

Once the rules are set up, you'll need to navigate to your Firm Settings, then the Engagement Approval section. There will be a new question asking the Account Owner what rules should apply for this specific engagement workflow.

When creating a rule, you define two primary elements:

• The "Always AND" Logic: All conditions within a single rule are cumulative. If a rule has three conditions, all three must be true to trigger an approval.
• The 3-Condition Cap: To maintain system performance and logic clarity, rules are limited to a maximum of three conditions.

To ensure compliance integrity, rules follow a non-reversible state; the below are for each state and the respective tab where these are located, once created:

• Draft: The "sandbox" phase. Users can edit logic, change the name, or delete the rule.

1. Active: The logic is "live." To prevent shifting goalposts mid-transaction, the logic is locked. Users can only change the Name or Status.
2. Inactive: The "retired" phase. The rule is archived for audit purposes. It cannot be reactivated or edited.

Build Conditional Rules:

Before beginning, please note that conditions, when used together, are cumulative and all criteria must be met for the rules to trigger the approval. If there are several rules and only one triggers, it will still require an approval. If they do not trigger any rules, the engagement will become active and won't require approvals.

1. To begin, head to the left sidebar and click on Guardrails, then click Rules. Next, click the Create Rule button at the top right of the page, and the modal below will open to add rules:

2. Add a name to reflect the rule for this approval method, and begin creating conditions.
3. After conditions, select where we should look for this information by selecting one of the following:

• Engagement: Targeting a Total Engagement Fee (TEF) or
• Client: Targeting custom currency attributes. (Note: This target only appears if the firm has created currency-based custom properties.)

Engagements will reflect an option in the next drop-down to Total Engagement Fee (TEF), where Client will show Currency Attribute to choose in the following drop-down named "What detail are we checking?" Be sure to set that client attribute up if you haven't before setting the rule so those are reflected accordingly; this article is helpful for this step, then come back to set this up.

4. Set the "How do we compare it? " section for the selected information as the best option from the drop-down ( e.g  Greater than(>)).

5. Next, set the dollar limit for the approval. If needed, you can add another condition using the + Add another condition button in grey, then click Save. Added a condition, but no longer want it? Just hit the red "x" at the top right of the condition block.
6. Your first creation will save as a Draft, so when you want this active, head over to the drop-down arrow to select Activate Rule.

As the above process creates conditions, updates at the bottom of the modal allow you to verify the intent before saving.

How to Clone a Rule

Once you have established rules and want a building block for another one, you can just clone it.

Using the actions drop-down arrow for any given rule, click on Clone Rule.

Once you open the modal, all of the information from the other rule will show, with the name beginning with clone so you can differentiate them.  Everything can be edited to create the new rule.

Examples of Rules

For a rule with a single condition, the first example a firm's Home office wants to review and approve any engagements that are over $25,000 (total engagement fee).

The second example is, for instance, when the client has a particularly low net worth. For this feature, we need to add Client attributes specifically; Currency is eligible to be used in Rules.

For our example where three conditions are being used, we'll use "Mass Affluence" where the firm's Home Office wants to review agreements for clients whose net worth is between $10M and $40M and the agreement is greater than $80,000 TEF.

Rule Statuses

After the creation of rules, you'll see the following statuses on the rules main page next to each of them. As you adjust them, these are what they mean and how they behave below in the table:

Activating or modifying a rule chain applies instantly to all newly drafted or submitted payment requests. Active recurring subscriptions already processing payments will continue uninterrupted unless an advisor explicitly attempts to edit the billing parameters.

Deactivating Rules

When your firm is looking to retire a rule from the workflows, we’ve made it easy to do so!

The deactivation process will notify the user which engagement workflows are actively using this rule. To deactivate a rule, click the Deactivate Rule in the action drop-down.

Once you hit that, an explanation of which workflows are using this Rule will show where you can confirm if you still want to Remove and Deactivate. See the example below.

If you click Remove & Deactivate, then navigate to the Engagement it was added to, the rule will no longer be there.