Bill approvers
If you have bill approval enabled in the "Invoice processing" or "Self-billing" flows, then bills need to be approved before payments are submitted to Tipalti. Initially, you need to manually define approvers on each bill/ invoice. Our AIArtificial Intelligence-driven approach uses this information to predict future approval sequences and over time, our machine learning reduces the need to manually assign approvers at all.
A single approver or a sequence of approvers can be assigned to each bill in the:
- Tipalti Hub - "Invoice review" or "Bill details" screen
- Digital bills CSV file for upload
- CreateOrUpdateInvoices API call
If you are using PO-backed bills, refer to Bill approval for PO-backed bills.
The applied approvers are automatically defined:
Tipalti AI uses an AI algorithm to analyze historical bill content, identify existing patterns, and predict the required approver sequence for every newly created bill. The system analyzes approver sequence history and makes predictions based on:
- Invoice supplier
- Custom fields such as "Department" and "Location"
- GLA general ledger (GL) is used for recording transactions related to business assets, liabilities, equity, revenue and expenses. account coding
- Bill amount
- Bill currency
Over time, machine learning (ML) improves these predictions, which reduces the need to manually assign approvers.
If you do not have the AI feature enabled, Tipalti uses the default approver sequence: if an approver (or a sequence of approvers) has been listed at least twice in the last three bills of a payee, that sequence becomes the default. Otherwise, the default is the approver list used on the previous bill for that payee.
Required user role Process Bills
On the "Invoice review or "Bill details" screen:
Click "Confirm & proceed".
In the "Approvers" section, click "Add approvers".
Enter the name of the approver and select it from the list.
- Rearrange the order of approvers by dragging and dropping the approver name.
Delete an existing approver by clicking the "X" beside the approver name.
When you manually add new approvers, they will be placed at the end of the approval chain.
When bills need to be approved, Tipalti sends email notifications to the bill approvers letting them know that the bills require their approval. Approvers can approve bills one by one directly in the emails or they can log into the Tipalti Hub to approve many bills at a time.
Approvers can:
To help your approvers, you can set up email auto-reminders so that they don't forget to approve the bills. You can also set an escalation path so if bills are not approved on time, the task can be escalated to an assigned manager who can ensure the bills get approved.
See Invoice processing approvals for information on how to approve bills one by one or many at a time.
Email notifications are not sent to bill approvers. Instead, bills that require approval appear on the Bills > Pending my approval subtab, which is specific to each approver (i.e., only the bills assigned to the approver appear on this tab).
Approvers can: