Where the invoices go to wait
Accounts receives the invoice, enters it, and forwards it to the manager who ordered the work. 'Can you approve this please?' The manager is on site, or in meetings, or on holiday. The email slides down their inbox. Two weeks later the supplier calls asking about payment, accounts searches for the forwarded email, and the manager says they never saw it or thought they had replied.
Some invoices go round twice. Some get approved by the wrong person because the right one was not obvious. And at month end, finance has a list of bills they cannot post as approved because a signature is missing somewhere.
Why approval is the slow step
Approval by email has no structure. The request looks like every other email, so it gets treated like one. The manager has to open the attachment, remember what the work was, check whether it matches what they agreed, and reply, with nothing to prompt them if they do not.
Routing is also usually informal. Who approves what depends on the cost centre, the amount, the supplier and who happens to be around, and that knowledge sits with the accounts person rather than in a system. When they are off, the process stops.
What slow approval costs
| Symptom | Effect on the business |
|---|---|
| Invoices waiting weeks | Suppliers paid late, relationships strained |
| Lost approval emails | Duplicate requests and wasted time on both sides |
| Unclear approvers | Invoices approved by someone without authority |
| No audit trail | Hard to show who approved what, and when |
| Month-end backlog | Payables figures in the ledger are incomplete |
Late supplier payment has a cost that rarely shows up on a report. Suppliers who are paid slowly put you further down the queue when you need something urgently, and some start adding terms or charges.
The approval flow we build
- Invoices enter from your capture process or accounting system as they are received, via the Xero, QuickBooks or Sage API.
- Routing rules decide the approver: by cost centre, project, supplier, amount band or the person who raised the purchase order. Deputies are defined for absence.
- The approver gets a message in the place they will see it, such as Microsoft Teams, Slack or email, with the invoice, the matching purchase order, what has already been spent against the budget, and any previous invoices from that supplier this month.
- Approve, reject or query in one action from a phone. A query goes back to accounts or the supplier with the question attached.
- Reminders and escalation: if nothing happens within the period you set, a reminder goes out, and after that the invoice moves to the deputy or the next level.
- Approved invoices are marked as approved in the ledger and scheduled for payment; the approval record, with who, when and on what information, is stored against the bill.
Higher-value invoices can require two approvers, and invoices that exceed the purchase order by more than your tolerance can be forced to a senior approver regardless of who ordered them.
What changes for managers and accounts
Managers approve invoices in a moment between other tasks, with everything they need on one screen. Accounts stops chasing people by email and can see exactly where each invoice is waiting. When someone goes on holiday, their approvals move to a deputy without anyone having to remember to arrange it. Your payables position in the ledger is current, because approval no longer holds things back.
And if your auditor or a director asks who approved a particular payment, the answer is one click away.
The routing rules also become a useful document in their own right. Writing down who can approve what, and up to which amount, is something many growing businesses have never done formally. Once it lives in the system, it is applied the same way every time, and changing it when someone joins or leaves is a quick edit rather than a round of emails telling accounts who to forward things to now.
Signs your approvals are the bottleneck
- Approval requests are sent as forwarded emails.
- Suppliers call about late payment on invoices that are waiting for sign-off.
- Nobody is quite sure who can approve what.
- Approvals stop when a particular manager is away.
- You cannot easily show who approved a given invoice.