How most bookkeeping firms approve vendor bills today
A vendor sends an invoice. The bookkeeper receives it, enters it into the accounting system, and emails the client: "Please review and approve this $3,200 invoice from ABC Supplies."
The client is busy. They don't reply for three days. The bookkeeper follows up. The client replies "approved" from their phone with no context. The bookkeeper screenshots the email for the file, marks it as approved in a spreadsheet, and processes the payment.
Multiply this by 20 vendors across 15 clients, and the bookkeeper is spending half their week managing email approval threads instead of doing bookkeeping.
What's wrong with email approvals
No routing. Every bill goes through the same process regardless of amount or vendor. A $47 office supply purchase gets the same email chain as a $15,000 consulting invoice. There's no way to automatically route high-value bills to a business owner while letting a manager handle small ones.
No decision trail. "Approved" in an email is not an audit trail. Who approved it? When exactly? Was there a condition attached? Email threads get deleted, forwarded, and buried. If someone asks "who approved this $10K payment?" six months later, good luck finding the answer.
No deadline enforcement. Bills have due dates. If the client doesn't approve by the 15th, the bookkeeper eats a late fee or pays out of pocket and invoices the client. Email has no concept of deadlines, reminders, or escalation.
No visibility across clients. The bookkeeper has no single view of "all pending vendor bills across all my clients." It's scattered across 15 email threads, each in a different state of follow-up.
How a workflow tool handles this
With EasyRequests, vendor bill approval becomes a structured process instead of an email chain.
The form captures everything up front. The Bill Approval template includes vendor name, invoice number, amount, due date, category, file upload for the invoice, and notes. No ambiguity about what's being approved.
Conditional routing by amount. Using the visual approval chain editor, you can set rules: bills under $1,000 go directly to the office manager. Bills over $5,000 route to the business owner. This happens automatically based on the amount field — no manual forwarding.
Approve from Slack in 30 seconds. When a bill needs approval, the assigned approver gets a Slack DM with the bill details and Approve/Reject buttons. They tap Approve, add an optional comment, and it's done. No email, no login, no dashboard. The decision is logged with their identity and timestamp.
Escalation if nobody acts. If an approver doesn't respond within 24 hours (configurable), a nudge reminder goes out. If they still don't act within 48 hours, the request automatically escalates to the next person in the chain — or auto-approves, depending on your configuration.
Dashboard with pending bills across all clients. The Bill Approval dashboard shows a smart widget with total pending amounts, a chart of approvals over time, and a list of all bills awaiting action — across all client workspaces. One screen, full visibility.
Integrations that close the loop
The approval is just one step. After a bill is approved, you need to act on it — enter it into QuickBooks, notify the accounts payable team, file the invoice.
EasyRequests connects to this workflow through Slack (real-time notifications), webhooks (trigger external actions on approval events with signed payloads and retry logic), a REST API (pull approved bills into your systems), and Zapier (connect to 5,000+ apps — route approved bills to Google Sheets, QuickBooks, or your project management tool).
The platform is the intake and approval layer. Your accounting tools handle everything after the decision.
The cost comparison
Managing vendor bill approvals over email costs your firm time — easily 5-10 hours per month across clients. That's billable time lost to administrative overhead.
EasyRequests starts at $29/month for up to 10 client workspaces. If it saves even 2 hours of billable time per month at $50/hour, it pays for itself three times over.
Get started
Set up a Bill Approval workspace for your highest-volume client. Share the intake link, configure a simple approval chain, and see how fast vendor bills move through your firm when they're not stuck in email.