Customizing the inbound flow

An account payable coming into your Billtobox account goes through a series of steps that you can customize to fit your workflow or your preferences.

Table of contents:

• 3 ways to accept an invoice
• Supplier approval
• Business approval
• Payment approval

When going to your Settings > Inbound, the settings displayed are in order of occurrence. Some steps are optional (supplier approval, business approval, payments approval), they can be turned on or off at any time. We'll come back to what these do later in this article. 

3 possibilities to accept invoices

When an invoice gets to your account, it must be accepted before it can continue on its way to the accountant and archive.

There are 3 ways to accept an incoming document: 

• Manual: each document needs to be approved manually by a user (default behavior)
• Trusted: invoices coming from suppliers that are marked as trusted (in the supplier's file) will be accepted automatically
• Automatic: all documents imported will be approved automatically
  
  Note: from here, you can also turn on the identification of duplicates, block their archiving, and automatically accept documents from whitelisted e-mail addresses. To whitelist email addresses, type them in the box and separate each email address with a comma. 

There are 3 optional steps that can be activated

• Supplier approval
• Business approval
• Payment approval

Supplier approval

Enable this option if you want an additional approval step for certain suppliers. In order to fully activate this option, you must go to the supplier's file (Customers &, Suppliers > Suppliers tab > click on the supplier of your choice) and designate a user who will approve the documents of this supplier under the Approval by option.

Business approval

By activating this option, a user with the Business approval role (activate this role in Settings > Users > click on the user of your choice) will have to approve all incoming documents (even if they have already been accepted by another user who does not have the business approval role).

Payment approval

When this option is enabled, a user with the Approve payments role will have a task created in their account in order to approve documents marked as paid by a user without this role.

For example, you can use this option to keep control over which documents have actually been paid.