QuickBooks bill approval workflow and QuickBooks Online invoice approval workflow without upgrading to Advanced

Intuit's own help article sets out what the workflow does. A bill can trigger approval on amount, vendor, location or a combination of them, with up to seven approvers in the first group and up to five approval layers in sequence. You choose whether anyone, any two people or everyone in a group has to approve. A separate payment release workflow, also on Elite and Advanced, holds the payment itself until an admin approves it. Requests nobody looks at for 30 days are denied automatically. Since August 1, 2026, Advanced includes Bill Pay Elite with no separate fee.

So the cheap answer is plain. If every cost your company approves starts life as a bill typed into QuickBooks, and all you want is a sign-off before it is paid, Bill Pay Elite at $45 a month ($540 a year) is the least expensive way to get it, and we say so in the table below. Moving from Plus to Advanced costs $200 a month more at list price, $2,400 a year, and only makes sense if you also want the 25 users, custom workflows and the rest of Advanced.

The answer changes when most of the spend never was a bill. At a ten-person US company a large part of what needs approving arrives as card charges, employee receipts and supplier invoices sitting in someone's inbox. Bill Pay Elite approves bills. It does not route the $1,900 software renewal that went on the office manager's Amex, or the hotel receipt a salesperson photographed, through anyone.

That is the job Expenditure does. You upload receipts and vendor invoices and import each card or bank statement as CSV, OFX or QFX. Every item is read at line level, coded to your QuickBooks chart of accounts and checked against earlier items for duplicates. Your approval rules then route anything over a threshold, for one vendor, one GL account or all spend, to an admin who approves or rejects it with a note. Growth gives one approval step at $21 per seat a month billed yearly; Scale gives up to three steps, each decided by a different person, at $33. When the month is done you export the coded lines as a QuickBooks Online CSV file and the full export shows who approved what.

We are just as plain about what we do not do. Expenditure does not pay vendors, never moves or holds money, and does not create bills inside QuickBooks or sync to it live. If you need approvals and payment in one place, Bill Pay Elite, BILL or Ramp are built for that. If you need sign-off on card spend, receipts and invoices before anything is booked, without moving to QuickBooks Advanced, that is what you are buying from us.