Most companies have an invoice approval process. Very few have written it down. The practical result is that approvals happen differently depending on who is available, how urgent the payment is, and whether the right person answers their email that week. Invoices sit in inboxes. Payment runs are delayed. Suppliers follow up. Finance teams spend time on status chasing rather than processing.
Setting up a formal invoice approval workflow does not require expensive software. It requires clarity about who approves what, under what conditions, and within what timeframe — and then making that process systematic enough that it runs the same way every time.
Start with approval authority, not software
The most common mistake is to jump straight to configuring workflow software before the underlying approval policy exists. Software can only automate decisions that have been made. If the rules about who can approve a CHF 50,000 invoice are unclear or inconsistently applied, automating the routing just delivers the invoice to the wrong person faster.
Before touching any system, document three things:
Who has approval authority, and up to what amount. A typical structure might give team managers approval authority up to CHF 5,000, department heads up to CHF 25,000, and CFO approval for anything above. These thresholds should reflect your actual risk tolerance and delegation policies, not copy a template from the internet.
What conditions require additional approval. First-time suppliers, invoices without a purchase order, invoices that exceed the contracted rate — these are all situations where the normal approval path may not be sufficient. Define the exceptions up front.
What happens when the primary approver is unavailable. Absence cover is the most overlooked part of any approval workflow design. If your only authorised approver is on holiday for two weeks and there is no defined substitute, every invoice in that queue waits.
Invoice types and their routing logic
Not all invoices follow the same path, and a well-designed workflow reflects this.
PO-backed invoices that pass three-way matching cleanly should require minimal human involvement. If the invoice matches the purchase order and the goods receipt within tolerance, auto-approval within defined limits is appropriate. The controls are already in the matching process.
Non-PO invoices — for professional services, subscriptions, utilities, and similar spend — require a different path. There is no purchase order to match against, so a human must verify that the service was received and the amount is correct. Route these to the cost centre owner or the person who ordered the service.
Invoices with discrepancies should go to whoever is best placed to resolve the specific issue. A price discrepancy goes to procurement; a quantity discrepancy goes to the team that received the goods. Routing everything to a central AP queue and expecting them to investigate is slow and often ineffective — they do not have the context.
High-value invoices above certain thresholds should require a second sign-off regardless of whether they match a PO. The threshold is a business decision, but having no second-level check on large payments is a control gap.
The role of deadlines
An approval workflow without deadlines is just a notification system. Approvers need to know when action is required, not just that something is waiting.
Practically, this means setting escalation rules: if an invoice has not been approved within two working days, the system should send a reminder. If it has not been approved within five days, it escalates to the approver's manager or a designated backup. These rules should also account for payment terms — an invoice with a 10-day payment term needs a tighter escalation window than one with 60 days.
Tracking average approval time is one of the KPIs worth monitoring once your workflow is running. It tells you whether the process is working as designed and where the bottlenecks are. Long average approval times are usually a symptom of either unclear authority (people are not sure if they should approve) or absent backup cover.
Approval records and audit compliance
Every approval decision needs to leave a trace. For a Swiss company, this matters for two reasons: internal audit and VAT compliance. Swiss tax authorities can request invoice records going back ten years. If your approval records exist only in email threads or verbal conversations, producing them under audit pressure is painful.
A proper system records who approved each invoice, when they approved it, and whether any notes or conditions were attached. This does not need to be a sophisticated document management platform — even a structured entry in your ERP with an approver field and a timestamp is far better than nothing.
Approval records also protect your business in disputes. If a supplier claims they were not paid because their invoice was lost, you can show the exact date it was received, when it entered the approval queue, and what happened to it.
Connecting approval workflow to e-invoicing
One of the practical benefits of moving to structured e-invoicing is that it makes approval workflow integration much cleaner. A PDF invoice arriving by email requires someone to extract the data, enter it into your system, and then route it for approval — three manual steps before the approval process even starts.
An invoice arriving via eBill or PEPPOL is already in your system as structured data. The PO reference is readable by the matching engine, the amounts are extracted without manual entry, and the routing can begin immediately based on rules you have already configured. The approval process starts faster, and the data it works with is more reliable.
Keeping the workflow lean
There is a real risk of over-engineering approval workflows. Adding more approval steps, more conditions, and more sign-offs creates the impression of tighter control — but in practice it creates queues, delays, and workarounds. Approvers who are asked to review dozens of low-value invoices every week start approving without reading. The control becomes nominal.
A leaner workflow with clearly defined authority levels, good exception handling, and reliable escalation paths gives you genuine control at lower administrative cost. The goal is not that every invoice is touched by multiple people. The goal is that the right invoices are reviewed by the right people, quickly enough that payment runs on time.
Review your workflow once a year. Check whether the approval thresholds still match your actual spend profile, whether the escalation paths are still correct given any staff changes, and whether the volume of exceptions suggests that your matching rules need adjustment. An approval workflow is not a one-time configuration — it is a process that needs occasional maintenance to keep it fit for purpose.