An AP bill approval workflow you can run in BILL or QuickBooks Online

If the owner is the only one at the company, they still approve. You still enter. You still do not click pay on an unapproved bill because Friday is close day. Write that in the engagement letter. If bill pay is not in the letter, stop and send one. Extra work that moves money is not a minor add on.

Same order every week. Skip a step and you will pay a duplicate or miss a discount you actually had.

New vendors get a person, every time. A spoofed invoice for a known payee is the usual fraud. The policy can auto route $180 of the usual software. It should not auto route a new wiring instruction.

BILL documents approval settings under Settings, then Approval Settings. An administrator, or a custom role that can edit company preferences, turns approvals on. Approvals are not required to pay bills in BILL. You choose to use them. You can set whether bills may be edited after they are routed: never, always until paid, or only before the last approver. You can add up to three default approvers or groups, separate from policies. BILL assigns default approvers first, then policy approvers, then prior approvers for that vendor if you switched that on. Changing settings does not apply to bills already created. Approval status does not sync to or from the accounting software. (Manage approval workflow and policies)

Bill Approval Policies: Settings, then Bill Approval Policies. Name the policy. Choose bill amount less than, or greater than or equal to, then a dollar amount. Pick approvers or groups. Save. All approvers on a bill must approve, in the listed order, before BILL treats the bill as approved. Editing or deleting a policy applies to future bills, not old ones. Administrators can pay unapproved bills if the required approvers are assigned. That last sentence is the hole. If your bookkeeper is an administrator on the client's BILL account, the policy is theater. Use a clerk role to enter, an approver role for the owner. (Manage approval workflow and policies)

BILL's accountant materials describe the Approver role: on login they land on Pending Approvals, they can approve one bill or several at once from the Approvals screen, and they can deny from More Actions. They can also bulk approve from checkboxes. (AP setup: the approver role)

BILL notes that Team and Essentials plans use these policies, and that Corporate, Enterprise and Accountant plans have more options in a separate custom workflow article. Check which plan the client is on before you promise sequential groups you cannot configure.

Intuit documents bill approval workflows for QuickBooks Online Advanced and for QuickBooks Bill Pay Elite. Bill Pay specific roles include Bill approver (approve only), Bill clerk (add bills, mark paid, add and edit vendors, cannot approve or pay), and Bill payer (view and pay, cannot add bills). In Advanced you customize roles. The maximum number of users follows the Advanced subscription. (Bill approval and payment release workflows)

Intuit's steps for a bill approval workflow in Bill Pay Elite: open workflow templates, choose the Bill Multi Condition Approval template, name it, set conditions on amount, vendor, location or a mix, pick one to seven bill approvers, and if several, choose whether anyone, any two, or all must approve. You can add sequential layers, up to five. You can notify by email. Intuit says if a bill is not reviewed after 30 days, it is automatically denied. Save and enable. When a clerk saves a bill that meets the conditions, they are asked to send it for approval. Approvers work from Tasks, or from the Bills page Unpaid tab under Approval Status. (Bill approval and payment release workflows)

QuickBooks Online Advanced also documents Manage workflows under Settings. Intuit lists templates for invoices, bills, estimates, purchase orders and bill payments, and says there are more than 60 of them. Approval is one of the actions you can set. The clerk prompt, the Tasks list, and the 30 day automatic deny above are documented on the Bill Pay Elite article. (Use workflows in QuickBooks Online Advanced)

Without those SKUs, you still have a Bills page with For review, Unpaid and Paid. For review is where bills from other QuickBooks users land. Unpaid is where you schedule payment or mark as paid for an offline payment. (Review and manage bills) That page is a list. It is not an approval policy. If the client file has one login and no bill approval workflow, write the split on paper and keep pay off the bookkeeper's user.

Illustrative. S corp, owner plus an office manager, BILL on a Team plan, QuickBooks Online for the books. The firm enters bills. The office manager approves under $2,000. The owner approves $2,000 and up. The owner pays.

The equipment bill needed two people. The tool bill waited. The books stayed boring. That is the win.

• Pay on an unapproved bill, even if BILL will allow an administrator to do it
• Change a vendor's bank details because an email asked
• Mark as paid in QuickBooks because the owner 'sent it from the bank app' with no proof
• Approve as the owner because the owner is on a job site and 'just do it'

If the stall is the owner not opening Pending Approvals, an AI assistant can draft the named nudge from the unpaid list. You still do not pay for them.

What is an AP bill approval workflow? A repeating split of three jobs: enter the bill, approve the vendor and the amount, then pay. The person who enters does not pay. The owner or a named manager approves. You run the same weekly order in BILL or in QuickBooks Online.

Can the bookkeeper also pay? Not on an unapproved bill, even if the product will let an administrator do it. Write the split in the engagement letter. If bill pay is not in the letter, stop and send one.

Where do missing vendor receipts go? They belong on the monthly missing list, not in the approval queue. Use chasing bookkeeping receipts for statements and receipts, and keep this page for enter, approve, pay.