Invoice processing and approval workflows
Invoice capture, coding, approval routing and dunning — with spend visible before it is approved rather than three weeks later, when finance is no longer closing but chasing.
What invoice processing has to handle
Invoice capture and coding
E-invoices, PDFs and scans brought into one queue, coded against the chart of accounts, cost centres and projects — with suggestions learned from how the same supplier was coded before.
Approval routing and delegation
Routing by value, cost centre, supplier or project, with substitutes for absence so an approval chain does not stop for a holiday.
Spend visibility before approval
Committed spend against budget shown at the moment of approval, so the decision is made with the number in view rather than reconstructed afterwards.
Dunning and collections
Reminder schedules, escalation steps and disputes tracked against the invoice, with the correspondence attached to the record instead of an inbox.
Credit notes and adjustments
Partial credits, rebates and corrections handled as linked documents, so the net position of a supplier account is always derivable.
Supplier and buyer portals
Suppliers checking payment status themselves, which removes the highest-volume reason finance teams get phoned.
Don’t see your challenge here? Talk to us about your project
Most invoice problems surface during the close, not at approval
An invoice approved against the wrong cost centre, or a commitment nobody recorded, does not cause trouble on the day. It causes trouble at the close, when finance is explaining a variance rather than finishing.
That is why we treat budget visibility, commitment recording and coding quality as part of the approval flow itself, rather than as reporting built on top of it afterwards.
- Coded at capture
- Suggestions from history, corrected once not twice.
- Budget in view
- Remaining budget shown at the approval decision.
- Substitutes
- Delegation so absence never stalls a chain.
- Disputes tracked
- Correspondence attached to the invoice record.
- Audit trail
- Who approved what, when, and against which budget.
- Supplier self-service
- Payment status checked without calling finance.
A purchase and invoice approval application for finance teams
The Zahara web application is purchase and invoice approval work in its most direct form: getting spend approved by the right person, coded correctly and visible against budget before it becomes a commitment. The interesting engineering is in the routing rules and in keeping the approval history defensible.
Common questions
Do you replace our accounting system?
No. Invoice processing sits in front of the ledger and posts to it. The accounting system stays authoritative for the ledger; we handle capture, coding, approval and the audit trail around it.
Can it handle e-invoices and scanned PDFs together?
Yes. European e-invoice formats are processed structurally; PDFs and scans go through extraction with a review step. Both end in the same queue so approvers do not need to care which route an invoice arrived by.
How do you handle approval when someone is away?
Delegation and substitution are part of the routing model rather than an administrative workaround, including time-bounded substitutes and automatic escalation when an approval sits too long.
Let's talk about your billing platform
Tell us what your commercial model looks like today and where billing is holding it back. We will come back with an honest read on the pricing model, the reconciliation work involved, and what a realistic first phase looks like.
