Bill approvers
Required user role: Bill approver
Required permission: Approval Management
If bill approvals are enabled for your Invoice processing or Self-billing flow, bills must be approved before payments are submitted to Tipalti.
Where approvers are assigned
You can assign a single approver or an approval chain to a bill using:
- Tipalti Hub (invoice review or bill details)
- Digital bills CSV upload
- CreateOrUpdateInvoices SOAP API
If you're using PO-backed bills, see Bill approval for PO-backed bills.
How approvers are applied
Approvers can be applied automatically, or added by an AP processor on the bill.
Applied automatically
Approvers can be applied automatically based on:
If Tipalti AI is enabled, it predicts an approver chain for newly created bills based on historical bill and approval patterns. Predictions can consider supplier, coded fields (for example, department or location), GL coding, bill amount, and currency. Over time, you won't need to add approvers as often.
If Tipalti AI isn't enabled, Tipalti uses recent approver history for the payee:
- If the same approver (or chain) appears at least twice in the last three bills for a payee, that chain becomes the default.
- Otherwise, Tipalti uses the approver list from the previous bill for that payee.
Added on the bill
An AP processor can add or adjust approvers directly on a bill in Tipalti Hub. For steps, see Add bill approvers.
How approvers are notified
Invoice processing
Approvers receive email notifications when bills need approval. They can approve bills directly from email or log in to Tipalti Hub to approve multiple bills. Find out how to approve bills, send them back to the AP team, or dispute them:
To support timely approvals, you can configure auto-reminders and escalation.
Self-billing
Email notifications aren't sent. Bills that need approval appear in Bills > Pending my approval for each approver. Approvers can:
Find out more about self-billing.