Xero approval workflow software for bills and expenses, the Xero bill approval process and Xero invoice approval workflow compared

So a US company on Xero that needs a manager to sign off on larger bills, or two people to sign off on the biggest ones, buys an approval app beside Xero. The best known is ApprovalMax. Its own pricing script, read on October 6, 2026, prices it per Xero organization with unlimited approvers. In USD, billed yearly, Standard is $50 a month for up to 100 documents, Advanced is $82.50 and Premium is $111.66. Billed monthly those become $60, $99 and $134. At 300 documents a month Standard is $86.66 and Advanced $132.50, and per-document overage applies above each tier.

On Xero, ApprovalMax Standard approves bills, purchase orders, credit notes and sales invoices, and syncs each decision back into Xero. Advanced adds bill-to-PO matching, auto-approvals and manual journal approvals. Approvals for expenses and reimbursements are standalone workflows, a Premium feature. If every cost you approve is a bill or a PO in Xero, ApprovalMax Standard at $600 a year is the cheaper and more direct answer, and we say so in the table below.

The answer changes when most of the spend never becomes a bill. At a ten-person company a large part of what needs a sign-off is a card charge, an employee receipt or a supplier invoice in someone's inbox. Xero only lets staff claim expenses on the Established plan, $97 a month against $59 for Growing, and that claim flow has the same single approval step.

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 Xero chart of accounts and checked against earlier items for duplicates. Your approval rules route anything over a threshold, for one vendor, one account code 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 closes you export the coded lines as a CSV in Xero's precoded bank statement format, with the account code on every line.

We are just as plain about what we do not do. Expenditure does not create bills inside Xero, does not sync to Xero live and never moves or holds money. If you need approvals written into Xero bills and purchase orders, use ApprovalMax. If you need card spend, receipts and invoices approved and coded before they reach Xero, without moving to the Established plan for expense claims, that is what you buy from us.