In small businesses, efficient approval processes are crucial for maintaining financial control, ensuring accuracy, and establishing robust audit trails. This is where ApprovalMax comes into play. ApprovalMax is a powerful cloud-based solution designed to streamline and automate approval workflows for small businesses. It integrates seamlessly with popular accounting software like Xero and Quickbooks, providing a comprehensive solution for managing bills, expenses, purchase orders, sales invoices, credit notes, and vendor creation.
One of the key benefits of ApprovalMax is its ability to simplify and expedite the approval process. By setting up customizable approval workflows, businesses can ensure that all financial transactions are properly reviewed and authorized before processing. This helps prevent errors, duplicate payments, fraud, and unnecessary spending.
Additionally, ApprovalMax offers advanced features such as budget control, document matching, and multi-level approvals. These features enable businesses to maintain better control over their finances while reducing administrative burdens.
By implementing ApprovalMax into their operations, small businesses can improve efficiency, accuracy, and compliance in their financial processes. It allows them to focus on core business activities while ensuring that all expenditures are adequately monitored and approved. It is a small investment that helps improve controls and your company’s profitability.
Flexible approval workflows with the ability to keep requesters and approvers out of the accounting system
With ApprovalMax, small businesses can easily define roles and permissions for different employees or departments involved in the approval process. The software can automate simple and complex delegation matrices.
This ensures that the right people have access to the relevant documents at each stage of the workflow. ApprovalMax approvers don’t need access to the accounting system and only see information that is relevant to supporting documentation that is relevant to enable them to make a well-informed decision.
How does ApprovalMax work with Xero?
ApprovalMax allows you to set up dedicated authorization workflows for vendor creation, purchase orders, bills, accounts receivables, and credit notes. For example, when a bill is submitted, it gets submitted for approval to the right persons. They will receive an email notification about the pending transaction with the supporting documentation attached. This way the decision-takers possess all the required documentation to make a well-informed decision. They can process transactions by email or through the ApprovalMax mobile app.
A major enhancement of the software was the introduction of a Review Step to ensure that the transaction is accurately coded before the approval workflow is initiated. In the event that some bill details need to be changed, editing on approval rights can be granted to specific approvers. There is no longer a requirement to restart to approval workflow. It is also possible to include other Users from outside of the normal workflows to elaborate on transaction details through the Watchers & Mentions function.
Once the approval workflow is completed, an audit report is generated and automatically attached to Xero. The report establishes a robust audit trail and makes the approver(s) accountable for their decisions. It is a feature that will not only be well-received by your auditor(s) but also by senior management.
Eliminating paper and manual approvals
ApprovalMax enables truly paperless accounting: it is no longer required to print out invoices and have them signed off, or to send email and follow-up emails to budget owners for their approval. The entire workflow process has been automated.
Key accounting workflows
- Purchase Order (PO) creation and approval: You can authorize any employee to create Purchase Orders without having access to the accounting system. Approvers are immediately notified of pending PO requests.
- Bill review and approval: ApprovalMax automatically pulls all bills that are submitted for approval from Xero and routes them according to your customized authorization matrix. The matrix can be defined as a function of the supplier, amount, general ledger code, etc.
- Bill to Purchase Order Matching: When a supplier submits a new bill, the bill can be matched with a previously issued Purchase Order. This way the budget owner maintains oversight on the total amount of the invoices that have been presented and the invoice amounts that will be submitted later.
- Sales Invoices Management: By pushing your sales invoices and credit notes through ApprovalMax, your sales teams get involved in the validation and approval of the sales invoices before they are sent out. This way you can ensure they are accurate and in line with what has been agreed with your client.
- Vendor Creation: You can safeguard the integrity of your master vendor list by restricting the creation of new vendors.
- Manual Journal: Approval workflows for Xero Manual Journals can be setup in ApprovalMax. This way you can establish robust financial controls and audit trails for the manual journal entries.
- Xero Accrual Reports: The software allows for the generation of journal entries based on the accrual reports. This allows for highly automized adjustments for workflows for which the approval process is not completed yet and that would otherwise not get reflected in the financial statements.
The audit report, which gets posted in Xero, will also include the comments made by the Approvers at the time of processing of the transactions. This adds important contextual information to the audit report.
ApprovalMax is a popular Xero extension
ApprovalMax received 473 reviews on the Xero App Store as of 31 December 2024. 84% of the users rated the application 5* with 15% of the users awarding 4 stars. We believe that it is a powerful piece of software that is easy to implement, intuitive, and well-received by the end-user.
This view is not only shared by us. ApprovalMax was named in Xero’s 2024 Top App Lists in the following two categories: Most Popular Apps and Most Recommended by Advisors (AU and UK).
Summary
ApprovalMax extends Xero’s core software with approval-driven financial controls for AP and AR, such as bill-to-PO matching, budgeting control, and audit reports. These controls help prevent errors, duplicate payments, fraud, and unnecessary spending.
Some of the key benefits are:
- Take approvers out of Xero: Not every approver needs access to the accounting system.
- Establishes financial controls and traceability.
- Flexible approval workflows ensure compliance with internal and external regulations.
- Automation: Fully automated multi-role and multi-tiered approval workflows result in efficiency gains.
Facfo is a Singapore-based management consulting company specializing in financial analysis, financial modeling, and risk management services to startups, SMEs, VC and PE firms. We are an authorized ApprovalMax partner. If you would like to receive support to implement ApprovalMax or schedule a product demo, please feel free to reach out to us.