Preview an approval chain before saving
Routing preview lets you simulate how an invoice would move through a draft or edited policy before saving it. Use it to confirm the chain behaves the way you expect, especially when priority order or condition logic gets complex.
When to use the preview
- Before saving a new policy, to confirm a sample invoice routes correctly.
- After changing priority order, to confirm an invoice still hits the policy you expect.
- After adding or modifying conditions, to confirm the policy now matches the right documents.
- When debugging why a real invoice did not route as expected.
Open the preview
The Preview routing action is not yet exposed inside the customer-facing Create Approval Policy dialog. The dialog's visible buttons today are How approval policies work, Add Condition Group, Add Step, Cancel, and Create policy. A self-serve routing-preview surface is on the roadmap — until it ships, the documented best practice is to use one of the workarounds in the next section to sanity-check a policy before relying on it for production traffic.
Workarounds until self-serve preview ships
- Use a low-stakes test invoice. Create a policy, then upload (or wait for) a sample invoice that should match it. Open the invoice's Approvals tab to see the chain that was generated. Adjust the policy if the chain isn't what you expected. This is the closest equivalent to a live preview today.
- Ask the Mod AI team to dry-run a policy for you. Email support@usemod.ai with the policy configuration and a hypothetical invoice (vendor, amount, matched PO status). They can confirm which policy would match and what chain would be created.
- Order policies carefully. Policy priority controls which policy wins. The first matching policy applies and Mod AI stops evaluating. Order from most-specific (high priority) to most-general (low priority). See Editing and Reordering Policies.
What the preview will show (when shipped)
These sections describe the planned behaviour of the routing-preview tool. Today, refer to the workarounds above; the descriptions below are what the in-app surface will surface once the self-serve tool ships.
- The first matching policy (priority winner).
- The full approval chain that would be created: every step, the approvers on each step, and the Any / All mode.
- Which conditions on the policy matched the sample invoice and which did not.
- A note if no policy matches (the invoice would skip approval entirely).
Iterate on the policy (when shipped)
If the preview surfaces something unexpected, edit the policy in place and re-run the preview without saving. Once the chain looks right, save the policy.
Preview a few sample invoices that span the conditions you expect to see in real life: an above-threshold amount, a vendor-specific case, and the edge cases you are worried about. Catching a misconfiguration before policy goes live is much cheaper than catching it after — whether you use the future in-app preview or the live-invoice workaround documented above.