What is this page about: How a submitted bill routes to its approvers, how an approver approves or rejects it in Light, and what happens to the bill's status and accounting entry at each step. Written for anyone submitting bills and for finance teams managing approval workflows.
Getting a bill approved in Light is quick: submit it, and Light routes it to the right people automatically based on rules your team sets once. Here's how the whole flow works.
On this page
- Why bills go through approval
- Submit a bill for approval
- How Light decides who approves a bill
- Approve or reject a bill
- Track approval history
- What happens after approval
- Related articles
Why bills go through approval
Approval routing puts the right person in front of a bill before it's paid. Instead of routing every bill by hand, your team sets the rules once, by entity, amount, or GL account, and Light applies them automatically to every bill.
Submit a bill for approval
- Open the bill in Light while it's in Draft or in the Inbox.
- Click Submit for approval.
Light checks that all required fields are filled in, then routes the bill based on your configured approval workflow (set up under Settings > Workflows).
How Light decides who approves a bill
Approvers come from your published workflow rules, which commonly route bills by:
- Entity
- Amount threshold
- GL account or cost center
A workflow can chain multiple approval steps. Light sends a bill to the next approver only once the current step has approved it.
An approval step can be assigned to an individual approver or to a user group. If a bill is routed to a user group, it shows up in the Approving tab for every member of that group, and any member can approve or reject it on the group's behalf. You can also filter the Approving tab by your own user ID to find bills awaiting your action, including those routed to a group you belong to.
Approve or reject a bill
Once a bill is submitted, it appears in Light's Approving tab. Open it from there (or go straight to the Approving tab in Light) and choose one of two actions:
- Approve. The bill moves to the next approval step, or, if this was the last step, to Scheduled.
- Reject. Light opens a confirmation dialog with an optional notes field. Confirming sets the bill's status to Declined, and the bill then appears under the Discarded tab on the Payables page.
Track approval history
Every bill's detail view includes an approval log showing who approved or rejected the bill, when, and any notes left at each step.
What happens after approval
Once a bill clears every approval step, Light posts its accounting entry automatically, and the bill is ready for payment scheduling. From there, you're all set to schedule the payment.
Related articles
Also searched as: bill approval workflow, approve or reject an invoice, AP approval routing, declined bill status, discarded bills, approval log.