ApprovalMax bill review and approval for QuickBooks Online

How it works

Bills can now be created directly in both the ApprovalMax web interface and its mobile app. ApprovalMax will pull in vendors and inventory automatically from your QuickBooks Online account so, in terms of user experience, creating bills in ApprovalMax feels pretty much the same as creating them in QuickBooks Online.

As soon as a bill has been created in ApprovalMax, it will be routed automatically through a multi-step and multi-role approval process that is based on predefined criteria; such as vendor, amount, category, class, location, etc. The approval workflow is set up once, when the organisation starts using ApprovalMax. Requesters need no further information as to where their bills have to go for approval and have no additional manual work when submitting a bill. After review and authorisation, bills are pushed to QuickBooks Online ready for payment, with the audit reports automatically attached.

App Advisory Plus View

One problem here is that it is not yet possible to use data extraction technology to get the bill in to ApprovalMax to trigger the approval process. This means that whilst you gain from using the approval process, you loose from needing to manually create the bill.

It is possible to set up ApprovalMax accounts for your suppliers and allow them to create bills themselves. However it’s unlikely that all suppliers will be happy to do this.

To improve the integration ApprovalMax should either:

1. Create direct integrations with Receipt Bank, AutoEntry and other accounts payable data extraction apps.

2. Pull in bills from QBO and then change line items value to £0. Once the approval process has been completed update the bill to the actual values again.