Ask a Sage 50 finance team how purchase invoices get approved and the answer is often a mix of printed copies, forwarded emails and the dispute flag. It works, until the business grows, managers start working remotely, and nobody can say where an invoice is.
The root cause is simple. Sage 50 Accounts does not include an invoice approval workflow. This article explains how that gap slows approval down, the workarounds most teams use, and how to fix it without changing your accounting software.
The gap in Sage 50
Sage 50 is built to record transactions, and it does that well. What it does not provide is a way to send a purchase invoice to a manager, wait for their decision and record it. Purchase invoices in Sage 50 do not have a draft or awaiting approval status. They are either posted or they are not.
Sage itself points users who need approval towards add-ons in the Sage Marketplace. Until one is in place, approval happens outside Sage 50 entirely.
The workarounds, and why they slow things down
Print, sign and pass around
The invoice is printed, initialled by the manager and returned to accounts. It is slow when people are in the office and stops completely when they are not.
Approval by email
Accounts forwards the PDF and waits for a reply. Emails get buried, replies say “looks fine” without saying who checked what, and the decision lives in someone’s inbox rather than with the transaction.
Post first, dispute later
Some teams post every invoice to Sage 50 straight away and mark unapproved ones as disputed so they are not paid. It keeps the ledger current, but tracking which disputed invoices are waiting for which manager becomes a spreadsheet job of its own.
One person approves everything
In smaller teams the finance manager or owner approves every invoice. It is quick at first and becomes the bottleneck as volumes grow. It also means budget holders never see the costs they are responsible for.
Five reasons approval stalls
- Nobody is notified. Approvers do not know an invoice is waiting until someone chases them.
- No routing rules. Accounts has to decide who should approve each invoice, one at a time.
- No limits. A £100 invoice and a £10,000 invoice follow the same path, so senior people spend time on low-value items.
- No visibility. Nobody can see how long an invoice has been with a particular approver.
- No record in Sage. At audit or month-end, evidence of approval has to be pieced together from emails and paper.
How to fix it
PaperLess Invoice Approval adds a full approval workflow to Sage 50, fully integrated with your accounts.
Route invoices automatically. Once Automatic Invoice Recognition has captured the invoice data, approval rules send each invoice to the right person based on supplier, nominal code, department, project or cost centre.
Set approval limits. Define thresholds so that higher-value invoices go to senior managers while lower-value ones are approved by a budget holder or automatically.
Control who approves what. User rules set what each person is authorised to approve, so a manager can only sign off invoices in their area and up to their limit.
Approve from anywhere. Approvers get a notification and can review and approve invoices in a web browser or on the PaperLess mobile app.
Keep the audit trail in Sage. Every approval is timestamped, and the full approval history can be looked up from the transaction lines in Sage 50. No more searching email to see who approved what, and when.
Keep accruals current. If you need costs in Sage 50 before approval is complete, the dispute approval method posts the invoice when it is sent for approval with a dispute flag, which is removed automatically once final approval is given. Our article on approving invoices without delaying your accruals explains how it works.
What changes for the team
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| Accounts decides who approves each invoice | Rules route every invoice automatically |
| Approvers find out when chased | Approvers are notified straight away |
| Every invoice follows the same path | Limits match the sign-off to the value |
| Disputed invoices tracked in a spreadsheet | Dispute flag removed when approval is complete |
| Approval evidence in email and paper | Approval history looked up from Sage 50 |
One PaperLess client described the main benefit as being able to see quickly who and what was causing hold-ups, because they could see how long each user had held a document. That visibility alone tends to shorten approval times, before any other change.
Getting started
Write down who approves what today, including the informal arrangements. Agree value limits with your finance director and map each nominal code, department or project to an owner. Those rules become the basis of your approval workflow in PaperLess.
To see invoice approval working with Sage 50, book a free online demo. For more on what to expect, read our Sage invoice processing questions and answers.
