Entering unapproved bills

Forum|Forum|2 hours ago
October 2, 2026
1 reply
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Internally we are having differing views on how to handle the situation below. I am new to the company and am battling some of the “that’s the way we have always done it” mentality.

Let’s say a bill comes in from our law firm for $500 for services performed. The current procedure is that the bill will be manually forwarded to the approver and once approved it will be entered as an accounts payable in IES. The advantage to this approach is that only approved bills get entered into IES which in turn cuts down the possibility of cutting checks for unapproved bills. The disadvantage is that , at least in my view, accounts payable is understated by the amount of unapproved bills not yet entered and bills can get lost

My preference is to have the bill entered into IES upon receipt then sent to the approver for approval. The advantage to this approach is I have a better feel for what our true accounts payable liability is. The disadvantage is that it’s possible that unapproved bills get chosen for payment. .

There is not a high volume of bills that contain discrepancies.

I’m wondering how others handle this situation or if there is a way to denote bills as unapproved when they are first entered to help mitigate the possible payment of unapproved bills..

I have not yet explored workflow automation. Is that a possible solution?

Thanks for your help and suggestions.

QuickBooks Enterprise Suite

S

SashaCMC

Moderator

Thank you for reaching out to the QuickBooks Community, fmkport. Your preference is commonly used in accounting practice. Entering bills upon receipt ensures your balance sheet reflects true, real-time liabilities and prevents lost invoices.

QuickBooks Enterprise Workflow Automation solves this exact conflict. If you have QuickBooks Enterprise Diamond or Platinum, it allows you to enter bills immediately to capture the liability, while completely locking them down so they cannot accidentally be selected for payment until an authorized user approves them.

The article highlighted here have a video presentation as well as step by step process on how to create a custom approval workflow in QuickBooks Enterprise. The first steps would be to create the rule.

Go to Company and select Set Up Approval Processes.
Select Get Started, then Set up in the purchase order/bill template card.
Sign in to your Intuit account as an admin if you haven't already.
You’re taken to the approval process creation screen.
Enter the name and description for the process.
Enter the conditions for purchase orders/bills when you want to trigger the approval process. You can set up conditions on Amount, Vendor name and Vendor type.
Select the approver name and enter the email address of the approver.
You can customize the email subject and message.
Note: Add the email address to send the notifications to someone in addition to the approver.
Select Save & Activate and the approval process will activate for all the newly created purchase orders/bills.

You can also save the created process and activate later from the Approval processes tab.

From there you can move on to the next set of steps to complete the entire process. Please let me know if you have any additional questions. My team and I will be here ready to help. See you soon.

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