Approving a bill is the point where a piece of paper from a trade becomes a real cost on a real job. Everything before it is provisional.
The review queue
Bills arriving from email, from QuickBooks, or entered by hand land in review rather than going straight onto the budget. The queue exists so that nobody has to remember which bills are waiting: it shows you the ones you can act on, which is not the same as every bill in review.
If a bill is waiting on someone else's approval step, it is not in your queue. That is intentional. A queue full of things you cannot action is a queue people stop opening.
What an approval workflow does
An approval workflow is an ordered list of steps, and each step names who can clear it. A bill in review sits at its current step until someone entitled to approve that step acts, then moves to the next.
Steps can be assigned to a specific person or to a role. Assigning to a role is usually the better choice: it survives someone being on vacation, and it survives them leaving.
You can have more than one workflow and have different ones apply to different situations. A bill over a threshold going through an extra pair of eyes is the common case.
If no workflow applies, the bill still needs approving; it just does not route through steps first.
What changes on approval
The moment a bill is approved:
- It becomes an actual cost against its cost codes, and shows up in the job's actuals beside what you estimated.
- It becomes payable. Approval is what makes it eligible to be paid; paying it is a separate action.
- If you sync with QuickBooks, it becomes eligible to go across.
The last point is why approving deserves to be treated as a real decision: it is the step that lets a number leave BldrTeam.
When something is wrong, do not approve it and fix it afterwards
Wrong project, wrong cost code, a quantity that does not match what was delivered. What you can do about it depends on how the bill reached you.
A bill in an approval workflow can be rejected. That cancels the workflow and sends the bill back to draft, where it can be corrected and submitted again. Rejecting is an internal action; the vendor is not notified, so if the problem is theirs, you still need to contact them yourself.
A bill submitted without a workflow can be returned to the vendor. That one does notify them, and carries your notes explaining why, so the correction request reaches the person who has to act on it.
Either way, fixing it before approval beats approving and editing after. Approval is what makes a bill payable and eligible to sync, so an approved bill has already traveled further than you want a wrong one to go.
What to check before approving
- Is it on the right job? A misfiled bill is the most common error and the hardest to spot later.
- Is it coded correctly? The cost code is what makes the actual comparable to the estimate.
- Does it match what you agreed? Against the purchase order or the awarded bid, if there is one.
- Has it already been paid? Duplicate invoices from trades are common, particularly around month end.
For how a bill gets as far as the queue in the first place, see how a bill becomes a cost. For the financial picture it feeds, see budget tracking.