By Steve Richmond, AP Automation Specialist, PaperLess Europe
1000+ Implementations | Expert in Invoice Management, AP Workflows and System Integration
If you ask an accounts team where invoices get stuck, almost nobody says data entry anymore. They say approval. An invoice sits in someone’s inbox, or gets forwarded around a chain of people who are all traveling or in meetings or simply too busy, and by the time it comes back the payment run has already passed, or the supplier is on the phone asking where their money is.
Having watched this pattern across more than a thousand implementations, I can say with confidence that invoice approval, not scanning and not data capture, is where most AP processes actually break down. This article looks at why that happens and what a properly built approval workflow changes for both the accounts team chasing sign off and the finance leaders who need visibility over what is being committed.
Why email approval chains fail, even with good people
Forwarding an invoice by email feels like a reasonable way to get a sign off, and for a handful of invoices a month it is fine. The trouble starts at volume. Nobody owns the chain once it leaves your inbox. There is no record of who has seen it and who has not. A manager on leave becomes an invisible bottleneck. And when something does go wrong, tracing what happened means searching through inboxes rather than looking at a single audit trail.
None of this is a people problem. It is a structural one. Email was never designed to be an approval system, and asking it to behave like one puts the burden of chasing, remembering and escalating entirely on whoever is under the most pressure to get invoices paid on time, which is usually the person with the least authority to make anyone else move faster.
What a proper invoice approval workflow actually does
A dedicated approval workflow replaces the chain with rules. With PaperLess Invoice Approval, invoices are captured and routed automatically to the right approver based on supplier, department, project, cost centre or value threshold, the same rules every time, with no one deciding case by case who should see what.
Invoice approval, from arrival to posted transaction, with PaperLess
- Automatic routing. Once PaperLess Automatic Invoice Recognition extracts the invoice data, the system already knows who the default approver is for that supplier or department, and sends it straight there.
- Escalation rules. If an approver has not acted within a set number of days, the invoice escalates automatically to a second approver or a manager, so nothing depends on someone remembering to chase.
- Value thresholds and second approvals. Invoices above a defined amount route for a second sign off automatically, without anyone having to remember which invoices need extra scrutiny.
- A complete audit trail. Every step, who approved what, when, and any comments left along the way, is recorded automatically and attached directly to the transaction in Sage, Xero or SAP Business One.
The audit trail is the part people underestimate
When I ask Financial Controllers what they actually want from an approval system, most of them talk about speed. But the feature that changes the most in practice is the audit trail. With approval history retrievable through a simple lookup from within the accounting software, a question like who approved this and why stops being a research project and becomes a ten second answer. That matters at year end audit, it matters when a supplier disputes a payment, and it matters when a CFO wants to understand a pattern of spend without pulling anyone off their day job to reconstruct it.
This is also where approval and purchase order matching work together rather than separately. Invoices that match an approved PO can post with no manual review at all, while anything without a PO, or with a variance against one, routes into the approval workflow automatically. Our Purchase Order Matching page covers how that side of the process works in full.
Approval on the move
The single biggest cause of approval delay that I still see, even in businesses that already automate everything else, is an approver simply not being at a desk. PaperLess On-the-Go solves that directly: approvers can review and authorise invoices from a browser or the mobile app, with the same audit trail and the same rules, wherever they are. It is included free for any business already using PaperLess Invoice Approval, and it is often the single change that has the biggest visible impact on how quickly invoices actually get approved.
What this looks like once it is running
Picture the full journey. An invoice arrives by email and is captured automatically. The data is extracted and the invoice is routed to the right approver based on rules set once, not decided fresh each time. If nobody acts within the agreed window it case easily be escalated. Once approved, it posts straight into Sage, Xero, Orderwise or SAP Business One with the invoice image and the full approval history attached to the transaction line. The accounts team stops being the people responsible for chasing approvals by email and becomes the team that manages exceptions and keeps the rules current.
That shift, from chasing to managing, is the real value of a proper approval workflow, and it is consistent across very different businesses. Our customer case studies show what it looks like across manufacturing, hospitality and services companies of different sizes, and if you want to see what the underlying cost of delayed approvals looks like for your own business, our AP automation savings calculator is a quick way to put a number on it.
As with the rest of our invoice management suite, this runs as a Sage certified solution and a certified app on the Xero App Store, and you can read what finance teams say about approvals with PaperLess on Trustpilot.
See your own approval chain automated
If your accounts team can tell you exactly how long invoices spend waiting for approval, you already know whether this is worth fixing. If they cannot, that itself is usually the answer. Book a free demo and bring a few invoices through a real approval chain in your business. We will show you how routing, escalation and the audit trail work together, live.
