Receive, code, approve, and hand off, without moving money.
Follow one invoice from intake to its frozen approval record and accounting handoff.
Step 1, Intake
Bills arrive the way they always have.
Your company gets its own ApproveAP address, and your existing vendor-facing mailbox can redirect to it automatically. Vendors change nothing. Every sender is recorded. If you turn sender filtering on, unknown senders wait for an admin before their documents are read.
Incoming
From: billing@officepartners.com
To: bills@yourcompany.com
Subject: Invoice INV-10045, July services
Step 2, Reading
The AI reads the invoice. A person stays in charge.
Vendor, invoice number, amount, and dates are extracted from the document, and every figure traces back to the page it came from. Low-confidence values, suspicious instructions, duplicates, and arithmetic problems stop for review. The AI proposes. It never approves or silently corrects a document.
What the system read
In Review- Vendor
- Office Partners Ltd.
- Invoice number
- INV-10045
- Amount
- $4,850.00
- Due date
- Aug 15, 2026
Source evidence is present and the line items match the total. Ready for coding.
Step 3, Coding
The next bill remembers the last coding.
ApproveAP keeps the accounts and classes used for this vendor's last bill. Your admin can apply that shape automatically or leave it as a one-click suggestion. Prior amounts are never copied, and the current coding is reviewed before it is sent for approval.
Vendor memory
Cloud Supplies · INV-1082
Last time, Cloud Supplies was coded to Software subscriptions for General operations.
The accounts and classes can be remembered. The old invoice amount is never copied.
Step 4, Approval chain
Approvals in order, by amount.
Your admin sets the amount tiers and who approves at each one. Approvers are emailed in sequence, with at most one digest per approver per company in a day. Once a bill starts its chain, later routing changes never affect it. If a bill waits too long on one person, your admin is alerted.
Chain of custody, frozen when the bill enters approval
A. Controller
First approver
Jul 24, 9:12 AM
ApprovedA. Director
Over $2,500
Jul 25, 8:40 AM
ApprovedBoard member
Over $25,000
Emailed Jul 25
Waiting- 4
Payor report
After chain completes
Waiting
Not yet reached
Step 5, Vendor check
Changed banking details stop the bill.
ApproveAP keeps every set of banking details it has ever seen for each vendor. A known vendor showing new details is a hard stop: the chain never starts and the payor never sees the bill. Your admin sees the old details next to the new ones, verifies the change with the vendor, and releases the bill. Every release is on the record.
Vendor check
HeldThe account number on this invoice does not match any banking details seen for Office Partners Ltd. The bill is held. No approver has been emailed.
Release requires an admin to record how the change was verified with the vendor.
Step 6, The handoff
Give the payor proof and the books a clean entry.
Every approved bill carries its frozen coding, complete approval chain, names, timestamps, authentication evidence, and original document. Connected companies can post the bill to QuickBooks Online. Other companies receive the same evidence with a QuickBooks-format entry CSV.
Approved handoff
Approved- Approved by A. Controller, Jul 24, 9:12 AM
- Approved by A. Director, Jul 25, 8:40 AM
- Original invoice attached
QuickBooks connected
Approved bill and document posted. The payment posts after it is recorded here.
Using CSV
Entry list ready in the order the QuickBooks bill screen expects.
ApproveAP records what was approved. Payment still happens outside the system.
See what the next invoice already knows.
Bring one recurring invoice. We will code it, route it, and show the complete handoff.