Invoice approval workflow

Flowtly Editorial Team6 min

Flowtly lets you route incoming supplier invoices through an approval step before they are paid. When approval is enabled, invoices wait in a pending list until an authorized person approves or rejects them. You can also skip approval and go straight to the Unpaid tab to select invoices and export a SEPA bank-transfer file for your bank.

Enabling the approval workflow

  1. Open the user context menu (your avatar, top-right corner) and go to Organization settings.
  2. Find the Invoices or Finance section and toggle Invoice approval workflow on.
  3. Configure who may approve invoices. If no approvers have been set up yet, the pending-approval page will prompt you to add them. Approvers are assigned directly on that page via a dialog; they receive the invoices-manager role.

Note: The Unpaid tab is always visible regardless of whether the approval workflow is enabled or not.

Who can approve

Approving or rejecting an invoice requires an invoices permission — Invoices viewer or Invoices manager. It counts whether the permission was granted to the person directly or through a permission group they belong to.

Flowtly picks an invoice's approvers in this order:

  1. The owner of the linked cost. If the invoice is attached to a cost that has an owner, and that person holds an invoices permission, the invoice goes to them.
  2. Everyone holding an invoices permission. Used when the invoice has no linked cost owner, or when that owner holds no invoices permission.

So a cost owner without an invoices permission is not asked to approve and is not notified. The invoice does not stall: it goes to the people who hold an invoices permission instead.

Note: The permission is what allows the decision, not merely appearing on the list. Someone listed as an approver who does not hold an invoices permission can open the invoice but cannot approve or reject it.

The approval tabs

Once the workflow is enabled, the supplier-invoices screen shows five tabs:

Tab What it contains
Awaiting Every invoice waiting for a decision, whoever it is waiting on. Approvers can approve or reject from here.
Waiting on me The part of Awaiting that is waiting on you personally.
Approved Invoices that have been approved and are ready to pay.
Rejected Invoices that were rejected. You can review the reason and re-submit if needed.
Unpaid All invoices that have not yet been paid, regardless of approval status. Visible even when approval is off.

Waiting on me

Awaiting shows everything the organization has in review, which for anyone but the smallest team is mostly other people's work. Waiting on me narrows that to the invoices where you are the person being asked to decide. It is the same list with the same actions, filtered to you — nothing is approved or rejected differently there.

An invoice only appears on this tab while it is still awaiting a decision. Once you approve or reject it, it leaves and moves to Approved or Rejected like any other.

When there is nothing for you to decide, the tab says so — Nothing is waiting on you right now. That is a narrower statement than the one Awaiting makes when it is empty: the organization can have a full queue while nothing in it is yours.

Approving or rejecting an invoice

  1. Go to Invoices in the main menu and open the Waiting on me tab — or Awaiting, if you want the whole organization's queue.
  2. Click an invoice to open its detail view, or use the action buttons directly in the list.
  3. Choose Approve or Reject.
    • If you reject an invoice, you can add a note explaining why.
  4. The invoice moves to the Approved or Rejected tab immediately.

Note: A decision needs both things: the person must be assigned as an approver on the pending-approval page, and must hold an invoices permission.

The Unpaid tab

The Unpaid tab collects every invoice that still needs to be paid — approved ones as well as any that bypassed the workflow. Use it as your payment queue.

Key features:

  • Multi-select — tick the checkboxes next to the invoices you want to pay.
  • Bulk export — once you have selected one or more invoices, the Export SEPA file button becomes active.

Exporting a SEPA bank-transfer file

Instead of entering each wire manually in your bank's portal, Flowtly can generate a standard pain.001 (pain.001.001.03) XML file that you upload directly to your bank.

  1. Open the Unpaid tab.
  2. Select the invoices you want to pay using the checkboxes.
  3. Click Export SEPA file (or similar label in the toolbar).
  4. Flowtly generates a pain.001 file and downloads it to your computer.
  5. Log in to your bank's online portal and upload the file using the bulk-payment or SEPA credit-transfer import feature.

Note: Make sure each supplier invoice has a valid IBAN and BIC set on the counterparty's bank account in Flowtly. Invoices with missing bank details cannot be included in the pain.001 export.

Example use cases

  • A finance manager reviews all new supplier invoices each morning in the Awaiting tab, approves valid ones, and rejects duplicates with a note.
  • A project lead who approves only the invoices for their own costs opens Waiting on me instead, and clears a short list rather than scanning the whole organization's queue.
  • At the end of the week, an accountant opens the Unpaid tab, selects all approved invoices, exports a pain.001 file, and uploads it to the company's bank — paying dozens of suppliers in one step.
  • A small team with approval disabled uses the Unpaid tab purely as a payment queue, exporting SEPA files without any approval step.

Connection map

Refers toUses upDerived fromPart of
Documented hereDocumented elsewhere
invoice billed to counterparty. invoice taxed by tax-group. cost spends against budget. cost owed to counterparty. bank-transaction reconciled to invoice. bank-connection imports bank-transaction. contract schedules payment-schedule-line. contract agreed with counterparty. contract attached to budget. budget covers project. invoice billed from project. project linked to budget. lead becomes counterparty. deal sold to counterparty.billed totaxed byspends againstowed toreconciled toimportsschedulesagreed withattached tocoversbilled fromlinked tobecomessold toIInvoice — A sales document issued to a client: line items, dates, tax. It is created, reviewed, previewed and then sent.InvoiceCCounterparty — The other side of a financial document — a client billed, or a supplier owed.CounterpartyTTax group — The tax treatment applied to a line, so rates are set once rather than per document.Tax groupCCost — Money the organisation owes or has spent, tracked against a budget.CostBBudget — The financial envelope an engagement is measured against — what was planned, versus what has actually been spent.BudgetBBank transaction — A movement on a connected bank account. Matching it to an invoice or a cost is what makes the books agree with the bank.Bank transactionBBank connection — The consented link to one bank that transactions arrive through. It can stop working on its own — a consent expires or is withdrawn — so it reports whether it is still working.Bank connectionCContract — The financial terms of an engagement: a structured set of payment schedule lines, in one direction or the other.ContractPPayment schedule line — One dated amount on a contract, in a direction — money owed to a supplier, or due from a client.Payment schedule linePProject — The core organizational unit for a business initiative, client engagement or internal work. Everything tracked — time, cost, invoicing, profitability — hangs off one.ProjectPProspect — A company you are working but that is not a customer yet. It sits at New, Contacted or Qualified, and everything done to it is logged against it.ProspectDDeal — A sale in progress: a customer, an amount, and the stage it has reached. It cannot exist without a customer, and its stage is never blank.Deal