April 27, 2026
Team changes happen. People leave, roles shift, structures get reorganised. But invoice approval rules often don’t get updated along the way, and that creates problems: invoices waiting for approval from someone who no longer works there, duplicate rules piling up across entities and projects, and no clear overview of who’s responsible for what.
If your approval workflows feel messier than they should, NEWTON gives you two straightforward ways to clean things up.
Why Approval Rules Need Regular Maintenance
Approval rules in NEWTON define who needs to sign off on invoices, grouped by category, insurance, legal fees, operating expenses, and more. These rules can be set at the project level (as a default for all entities within it) or overridden at the entity level for specific cases.
Over time, entity-level exceptions accumulate. Some are intentional. Others are leftovers from a one-off situation that never got removed. The result: rules that contradict each other, duplicate entries, and approval chains that no longer reflect how your organisation actually works.
Two Ways to Clean Up in NEWTON
1. The Approval Rules Report | Your Overview
Go to Reports → Approval Rules in the left navigation. This gives you a full overview of all rules across projects and entities in one place.
Here’s what to look for: if an entity-level rule shows up as a separate line with the same approvers as the project-level rule, it’s a duplicate. You can delete it directly from this view, just hover over any row to reveal the delete button on the right.
This is the fastest way to spot inconsistencies across your entire structure without having to open each entity individually.
2. Edit Mode | Rule by Rule
If you prefer to work at the entity or project level directly, switch to edit mode.
For entities: Open the entity, go to the “Approval Rules“ tab. Rules defined specifically for that entity appear in red. Hover to reveal the delete button. Note: if you have multiple approvers set, you may need to scroll right or widen your browser window to see it.
For projects: Open the project in edit mode and navigate to “Approval Rules.“ You can delete any parent-level rules right here. Entity-level exceptions within that project are not affected, they stay in place.
When Should You Do This?
A quick review of your approval rules makes sense:
- After a team member leaves or changes roles
- After a restructuring or entity merger
- Before an audit, to make sure approval chains are accurate and documented
- When invoices get stuck in the process with no clear approver
Clean Rules, Clear Governance
Messy approval rules are one of those things that seem harmless until they cause a delay at exactly the wrong moment. NEWTON’s Approval Rules Report makes it easy to keep things tidy, no manual tracking, no spreadsheet cross-referencing.
If you’re not sure where to start, open the report, filter by project, and look for entity lines that duplicate what’s already defined at the project level. Remove the redundant ones, and you’re done.
