Payments
Approve a payment (four-eyes / maker-checker)
Why the person who drafts a payment can never approve it, and how the approval step works.
The rule
Every payment passes through two people: a maker who drafts it and a checker who approves it. The two cannot be the same person. This separation of duties (four-eyes, or maker-checker) is the core control against both error and fraud — no single individual can move money alone.
On this platform the rule is enforced in the database, not just hidden in the screen. A payment you drafted will simply show no approve button for you, and even a direct attempt to record the same person as both maker and checker is rejected.
Approving a payment
- 1Open Payments and filter to Pending approval.
- 2Open the instruction and review the beneficiary, amount, currency, rail and reference against your source document.
- 3If anything is wrong, reject it back to the maker with a note rather than approving.
- 4If it is correct, approve. The payment is then screened against sanctions lists and, once clear, settled — debiting the account and posting to the ledger.
For very large amounts your organisation may require more than one approver. If so, the payment stays in Pending approval until every required authoriser has signed.
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About this guide
- Topic
- Making payments
- Reading time
- 2 min
- Views
- 2,341
- Found helpful
- 97% (121/125)
- Updated
- 08 Jul 2026