Put the supplier's history in front of every approver with Approval Intelligence

Introducing Approval Intelligence. Available today for Xero and QuickBooks Online.

A bill arrives from a supplier you've used for three years, and it's a third higher than the last one.

Finding out whether that's normal means leaving the bill, opening the ledger, pulling up the supplier and reading back through what they've charged before. Your approvers do it. They do it on a Thursday afternoon with a payment run to clear, one bill among thirty, and how far back they get depends on how much time the queue leaves them.

That's the gap Approval Intelligence closes. Approval Intelligence is a brand new AI layer built into ApprovalMax, and it's available to Xero and QuickBooks customers from today.

Same bill, different scrutiny: the hidden control gap in your approval process

Before we get into how Approval Intelligence works, it's worth reflecting on what we want it to solve.

The controls are set. How closely they're followed isn't entirely within your control.

The things worth catching don't announce themselves
Spend that has crept up over a year. A supplier who used to bill quarterly and now bills monthly. A vendor nobody has paid before. None of it shows on the face of the bill - you only see it against everything that came before.

The depth of the check is set by the clock
Whether your approvers get three bills back or thirty depends less on the bill than on how much of the day is already gone. The diligence is there. The time isn't always.

You can't see what any of it was based on
You can see who approved a bill. You can't see how much history they had in front of them when they did. The standard your team applies is real, but it's invisible, which makes it impossible to rely on.

What we chose to build

Most accounts payable processes can be automated safely, and ApprovalMax automates a great deal of it – routing, reminders, approval limits, the sync back to your ledger. The approval decision itself is the one part we've left alone.

Approving a bill is a decision real people are held accountable for. It's the approver's name that stays on the record. And when it comes to audit season, you can't point at the tools you use if a problem surfaces. That's what led us to Approval Intelligence.

We believe the role of AI in the approval process should be focused on surfacing information in a way that helps you make better-informed decisions.

So we started to build Approval Intelligence with two agents at its core:

Approval Agent

Approval Agent checks every bill against your history with that supplier, and flags anything that doesn't fit. The decision stays where it is. What it takes away is the hidden detective work that comes with deciding whether to approve a bill or not, and it sits on the approval screen your team is already in.

Using a simple traffic light system, it surfaces information such as:

This is well outside what this supplier normally charges you.

This supplier used to bill quarterly. This is the third bill this month.

This is coded to an account this supplier's bills don't usually go to.

You've never paid this supplier before.

No anomalies detected.

What changes is that the same checks now run on every bill, whoever opens it. Your approvers all start from the same place, however long they've been in the job and however busy the queue. Approval Agent shows your team where to look. It doesn't decide anything on their behalf.

Search Agent

Search is one of the most-used features in ApprovalMax, and customers have been clear that it could do more. Search Agent is the answer to that. Search Agent now lets you find bills, POs and approval history in plain language.

"What did we approve for Fairhurst last quarter?"

"Which bills are still sitting with Priya?"

It sits on top of ApprovalMax's existing search, applying the right combination of filters to find what you need quickly.

Better informed. Still in control.

With Approval Intelligence, we want the person approving a bill to already know what they'd otherwise have gone looking for.

The bill still arrives on a Thursday afternoon, one of thirty. What's different is what your approver knows about it before they decide.

Approval Agent is now available for bill approval workflow in Advanced and Premium plans, while Search Agent is available for all plans. Both agents can work with Xero and QuickBooks Online.