What the rules engine does
The rules engine is the layer underneath PayShore's approvals and payments. Every action that touches money (a payment about to go out, a transfer between accounts, an incoming receipt) can be evaluated against rules your team has defined in advance. If a rule applies, the action follows the policy. If not, it routes the way it normally would.
The point is not to remove human judgment from the loop. It's to make sure the same judgment your team would apply at month-end review is applied at the moment the action happens, not weeks later.
Three kinds of rules you can configure today
Approval thresholds. Payments above a set dollar value require an additional approver. Below the threshold, normal maker-checker rules apply; above it, a senior approver is automatically pulled into the chain. Thresholds can be set per workspace, per bank, per counterparty, or per payment type.
Balance routing. Define a target balance for each account. For example, "Operating account stays between $100,000 and $250,000." When the balance moves outside the band, the rules engine flags it for review or, if you've authorized it, executes a transfer from another account inside the same workspace.
Auto-sweeps. End-of-day sweeps that move excess cash from operating accounts into accounts that earn more, or consolidate balances across entities to a treasury account. Sweep schedules can run daily, weekly, or be driven by specific triggers. For example, after the day's payment run completes.
Why this matters
The problem with controls that live in email threads and senior approvers' heads is that they only get applied when the right person is paying attention. The threshold for an "extra approval" depends on who happens to read the email. The policy for moving excess cash gets remembered some weeks and not others. The audit trail is whatever you can reconstruct after the fact.
Encoding those controls as rules does three things. First, the policy gets applied every time, not just when someone notices. Second, the policy itself is visible: anyone with the right permission can see what rules are running and what they're doing. Third, every action the rules engine takes is recorded in the same audit log as every manual action, so the close doesn't require reconstructing what happened.
How it stays auditable
Every rule the engine applies is logged: which rule fired, which action it touched, which threshold was met, which approver was added. The log is the same append-only event log that covers every other action in PayShore. When an auditor or controller asks "why did this payment route to a senior approver?", the answer is one click away. Not one email chain away.
Availability
The rules engine is rolled out as part of the May 2026 release. It's available on the Growth and Enterprise plans. Customers on Essentials can configure single-level approval workflows; the rules engine adds the policy-driven layer on top.
If you'd like to see how the rules engine would apply to your team's existing approval policy, that's the kind of thing a scoped working session covers well. Bring your current threshold rules and we'll walk through how they'd encode in PayShore.