Invoice Processing & Approvals

Nothing is approved by us. Your thresholds decide who signs, your chart of accounts decides the coding, and your controller sees every exception before it clears. What changes is that invoices stop living in inboxes. Each one has a status, an owner and a date, and the aging report you look at on Friday matches what is actually in the queue.

We take the front half of that process as a defined service. Invoices come into one channel, get captured with the fields your system needs, and are matched against the order and the goods receipt before anyone is asked to approve anything. Matched invoices move on their own. Unmatched ones go to a named exception owner with the variance already calculated.

Finalert processes supplier invoices from receipt through to an approved, posted payable. The work starts at capture. Invoices arriving by email, portal, EDI or paper are pulled into a single intake, read for vendor, invoice number, date, terms, line detail and tax, then checked against what your system already holds. Vendors who send to four different people are redirected to one address. From that point every invoice has a record, a status and a person responsible for moving it, which is most of what an aging report needs in order to be trustworthy.

Coding happens before approval, not after. Each line is assigned a general ledger account and, where you use them, a cost center, department, project or class, following rules we build from your own history rather than a generic template. Recurring invoices inherit their previous coding and flag when the amount moves outside a tolerance you set. Your controller reviews the coding rules at the start and can change them at any point. We do not invent account mappings on the fly.

Matching, exceptions and duplicate control

Two-way matching compares the invoice to the purchase order on price, quantity and terms. Three-way matching adds the goods receipt, so you are paying for what actually arrived. Where you buy services against a contract rather than a purchase order, we match to the contract schedule instead. Tolerances are yours: a small freight variance can pass, a unit price above the ordered price cannot. Anything inside tolerance moves forward without a human touch, which is what keeps the exception queue short enough to be worked properly.

The exceptions are where the money is. Price variances, quantity shortfalls, receipts never entered, purchase orders closed too early, tax charged on exempt purchases: each one goes to the person who can resolve it, with the comparison attached and a date against it. Duplicate detection runs on vendor, amount, invoice number and date, loosely enough to catch the same invoice resubmitted with a suffix. We keep a log of what was rejected and why, so repeat offenders get discussed at the vendor review rather than paid twice.

Approval routing and month-end support

Routing is driven by your delegation of authority, not ours. We build the matrix into the workflow: the amount, the department and the expense type decide who approves, who approves after them, and what happens when an approver is on leave. Approvers see the invoice, the order, the receipt and the coding on one screen and act from email or phone. Reminders escalate on your schedule. Every approval is stamped with a name and a time, and that trail stays attached to the invoice for as long as you keep the record.

At close we give you the aging by vendor and by age bucket, a list of goods received and not invoiced for accrual, and the invoices still sitting in approval with the reason each one is there. What we do not do is pay. Payment runs, bank details and release controls belong to a separate service and to your treasury approvers. We also do not sign tax filings, issue audit or attest opinions, give legal advice, or act as your accountant of record. We prepare and document, and your controller approves.