A statement is what one person is owed for a period. An approval flow puts a review in front of that payment: the statements are frozen, checked by the people you nominate, approved, and only then marked as paid. You set the steps up once, and follow the same cycle each period.

Here's what will be covered in this article:

The Approval flow page holds two independent flows, side by side.

Compensations validation applies to individual compensations, before they reach a statement. It is the flow that produces the Validated status — and a validated compensation can no longer be adjusted.

Statements Approval, on the right, applies to the whole statement before payment. That is the one this article covers. Each flow has its own toggle, its own steps and its own preview, and turning one on does nothing to the other.

On the Statements Approval card, click Configure steps. The Manual Validation settings dialog opens with the steps as they stand.

A flow can have one step or as many as your policy needs. Each step is a Condition and an Approver.

The condition decides when the step applies. Always asks for the approval every time. The alternatives are based on the compensation value — greater than, between two values, or lower than — and choosing one gives you the fields for the amounts.

The approver can be the Compensation Recipient, the Team Manager of the recipient's team, Any Admin, or a specific person you name.

Each step also carries two options:

Use Add step for further steps, then Save Validation Settings.

A common shape is two steps: the Team Manager first, marked required, then Any Admin.

Go to Statements in the left sidebar. The cards across the top are the lifecycle — Pending approval, In review, approved, Paid — and each carries the action that moves statements into the next one.

When the period is closed and you are ready to review, use Mark as in review. Dolfin asks you to confirm, and says what will change: automatic updates are disabled for those statements, and any compensation update has to be accepted by an admin before it applies. The statuses move from Pending approval to In review.

That freeze is the whole point of the step. Values stop moving underneath you, so what you approve is what you looked at.

Once statements are In review, click Review on that card. It takes you through the statements waiting on you, one at a time, with the compensations that make up each total and the same person's history across previous months for context.

When a statement is right, approve it. You can leave a comment with the approval, or approve without one. Its status becomes Approved.

In the table, the Approved by column shows how far each statement has got through the flow — 0/2 where two steps are configured — so you can see what is still waiting and on whom.

Once a statement is approved and payroll has actually processed it, use Mark as paid. It records what happened outside Dolfin, which is why it comes last and is a separate action rather than part of approving.