Invoices & AP
One queue, clear thresholds, an audit trail.
Invoices pile up in a shared inbox, approvals happen over chat, and things get paid twice or late. Put the queue in a workflow where the threshold is a step nobody can walk around.
How it usually goes
Invoices sit in a shared inbox where two people think the other one is handling it.
Approval is a chat message that scrolls away, so the audit question has no answer.
The same invoice arrives twice under a slightly different reference and gets paid twice.
The workflow you'd draw
The approval and the vendor reply are gates: the invoice stops there and says so, instead of drifting forward.
The invoice arrives in the queue
Vendor invoices land in the Routing Inbox, from your personal mailbox or a shared ap@ inbox the whole org can see, and get routed into the Accounts Payable workspace. Or a completed job in another workspace opens the ticket for you.
Capture what matters
Vendor, amount, due date, GL code and PO number are workspace fields you define, filled from the ticket or by an update-fields step. The invoice PDF stays attached.
Branch on the amount
A branch node routes by value and vendor: under a threshold goes straight through, over it needs sign-off, and a combined condition (amount over 5,000 AND a new vendor) can take a third path.
Hold for approval
Waits for a personThe ticket parks at an approval gate with everything the approver needs on one screen. Approved and rejected are separate edges, so a rejection can go back to the vendor instead of forward to payment.
Tell the vendor, or ask them
Waits for a personA send-email step confirms receipt or queries a line item, from your real mailbox with the invoice details interpolated in. An await-reply gate holds the ticket until they answer.
Mark it approved for payment
A status-change step moves the ticket to your paid-or-scheduled stage. RouteWrk does not move money; it decides and records that the invoice is cleared to pay.
Resolve with an outcome
Completed, Denied, Duplicate or Cancelled. Duplicate is a real outcome here, and counting it separately is how you find out how often the same invoice arrives twice.
Everything the approver needs, on one card
An invoice parked at an approval gate shows the fields you chose to capture, the attached document and the full history. Approve or reject from the board or the ticket, and the decision becomes a permanent history entry with a name on it.
Why it holds up
Thresholds people cannot route around
The branch is in the workflow, not in a policy document. An invoice over the limit physically cannot reach the approved stage without a recorded decision.
Started by the work that caused it
A resolved work order can open the invoice ticket in the AP workspace through a cross-workflow node, fields carried over, and one job never produces two invoices.
The document stays with the decision
The invoice file is attached to the ticket that approved it, next to the timeline showing who approved it and when.
A shared AP inbox
Connect ap@ once for the org and everyone with access sees it, badged with which inbox it arrived in. Each workspace can also send as that address, so replies come from AP rather than from whoever happened to be logged in.
Guardrails on every send
A workflow that starts emailing the same vendor in a loop is stopped and parked with Retry-once or Skip. Unsubscribed and reported addresses are dropped at send time with a visible note on the ticket.
Where the queue is stuck, in numbers
Bottleneck dwell time tells you whether invoices are waiting on your approvers or on the vendor, and the two answers have completely different fixes.
Build it from a starting point. There is no pre-built accounts-payable product here; you start from the Intake & Route and Simple Approval workflow templates, or from an empty canvas, and define the fields and thresholds your finance process actually uses. That is deliberate: nothing about invoices is special-cased in the engine.
Other ways teams use it
Put a threshold where the chat message used to be.
Start free and build your approval queue in an afternoon.