Approve Invoice

This page walks you through the approval process for an invoice. This configuration is customizable based upon your organizational needs.

Each invoice can require up to three approvals. A single person may have permission for all three, just two, or only one.

Finance Manager - typically a finance person
Project Manager - a member of the PM team
Management - typically an operations director or finance director

The idea is that your project management, finance, and leadership must agree an invoice is ready before it can be issued to a client. Each group is allowed to make edits to the invoice. When an edit is made it resets the approvals to ensure the rest of the team is on board. Management approval is a bit special because you can set thresholds based on dollar amounts or percentages. For example, as long as the invoice doesn't exceed $500 or 10% of what we expected to bill then you don't need my approval to issue it.

There are many adjustments possible on an invoice, from changing descriptions on cards to marking things non-billable. Please see Time Adjustments and Cost Adjustments for a full list.

Permissions

Any adjustment to billable items like time, cost, or milestones triggers the approval process. Edits to the invoice itself like applied prepayments, taxes, or client address do not require approval.

The table below explains how each person gets categorized as either a finance, project, or management approver.

Approver Type	Permissions
Finance	Has cost center permission Create and Approve Invoices for the invoice cost center OR The system setting PM Can Approve Adjustments flag AND you are on PM team for all on projects on the invoice
Project	You are on the PM team for all projects on this invoice OR You are a finance approver for this invocice and the system setting Finance can act as PM is enabled
Management	Has cost center permission Management Approval of Invoices for the invoice cost center

Management Approval can always be required, never be required, or required when either a dollar or percentage amount is exceeded. This is configured from the System Settings Billing Tab.

The dollar and percentage amounts are based on the net of all adjustments. So offsetting adjustments on two cards would not trigger management approval. Excluding a card does not count towards net of adjustments EXCEPT if you were to adjust the card and then exclude it.

Find Invoices to Review

How do you know that you have invoices to review? On your Home page the Management Alerts card lists invoices awaiting your approval. You could also create a custom search to show you invoices awaiting your, or other's, approval.

Management Alerts:

Custom Search for my approvals:

Custom search for any unapproved invoice:

Review Changes

So you have an invoice to review, but how do you know what adjustments have been made? See the Invoices - Adjustment History tab. This gives the who, what, when, and why of adjustments. Click on an adjustment to see per card details.

Line item details of an adjustment.

Mark Approved

Once you are satisfied with the changes, tick the approved checkmark on the invoice summary tab. Or you can bulk approve from invoice search.

From an invoice:

From search:

Notify Reviewers

If you adjust an invoice you can notify reviewers of your changes. Click Manage then Notify Reviewers. Leave a comment and optionally add it to your invoice notes for record keeping.

To know who you'll be notifying see a list of approvers from the summary tab.