Purchasing & Approvals
Approve spend before it’s committed, and prove who approved what.
Purchase orders, deliveries and supplier bills in one place, routed through approvals that match how your business signs off spend.
Approval trail
- ✓R. EllisonProject manager
- ✓K. DoyleFinance (over £5,000)
The problem
Where spend gets away.
Orders raised in email.
Nobody sees the commitment until the bill turns up.
Approvals lost in inboxes.
It’s hard to prove who agreed what, and when.
Bills that don’t match.
Supplier bills get paid without checking what was ordered.
Purchase orders
Commit spend against the project, not after the invoice.
See committed spend the moment a PO is raised, not when the bill arrives.
- Raise purchase orders against a project and phase
- Generate a PDF purchase order to send to your supplier
- Approved orders count as committed spend against the project budget
- Approvers see a warning when an order would take the project over budget
- Keep one clean supplier list, with duplicate detection and merge
- RaisedAgainst a project and phase.
- ApprovedThrough the stages your rules require.
- Goods receivedIn full, or as part deliveries.
- Supplier bill matchedChecked against the order and what arrived.
- Over the PO value?Flagged, and needs confirming before it goes through.
Receiving and matching
Pay for what you ordered and what arrived.
Supplier bills are checked against the order and the deliveries before they go through.
Goods received notes
Record deliveries against the purchase order.
Part receipts
Receive an order in several deliveries and see what’s still outstanding.
Supplier-bill matching
Match supplier bills to purchase orders and the deliveries recorded against them.
Bills over the PO value
A bill that goes over the order value is flagged and has to be confirmed before it goes through.
Business costs
Costs without a purchase order can be recorded directly against the project, or brought in from Xero.
Approved POs and bills go to Xero
Once you switch that part of the sync on. What syncs with Xero
- SubmittedA purchase order for £8,400 on a project.
- Stage 1: project managerThe project’s own manager approves.
- Stage 2: finance groupAdded because the value is over £5,000.
- ApprovedEach decision recorded in the approval history.
- Edited later?A relevant change sends it back for approval.
Approvals
Approval routes that match how your business signs off.
Set up approval workflows for purchase orders, supplier bills, business costs, sales invoices and leave.
- As many approval stages as you need
- Stages triggered by value thresholds
- Approvers chosen by role: project manager, line manager, department or approval group
- Spend authority limits for individual approvers
- In-app and email notifications, with reminders for approvals that are waiting
Controls
Controls an auditor will recognise.
Approvals are only useful if they can’t be quietly bypassed or rewritten.
No self-approval
People can’t approve their own spend, even if they would otherwise be the approver.
Re-approval after changes
If an approved item is edited in a way that matters, it goes back for approval.
Tamper-evident history
Every approval decision is recorded in a history that shows if anything has been changed.
FAQ
Purchasing questions.
When does a purchase order count as committed spend?
What happens if a supplier bill is more than the PO?
Can people approve their own spend?
What if an approved purchase order is edited?
See an approval flow end to end.
We’ll walk through a purchase order from request to supplier bill, using an example business like yours.