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Guide
Capture and approve a bill
Upload your first bill, check what Zonitix read from it, and take it through approval until it is recorded as paid.
Before you start
- Finance is part of the Advanced plan. When your plan includes it, a “Finance” section appears in the sidebar.
- Anyone whose role lets them submit invoices can upload from My WorkSubmit Invoice. Checking, submitting and approving happen in the Finance workspace and need a finance role. In the built-in set, members of the “Finance” group can submit invoices and open the Finance workspace.
- At least two people. By default the person who uploaded or submitted a bill cannot approve it, and the person who approved it cannot mark it paid.
- The bill as a PDF, DOCX, PNG or JPG file, up to 10 MB.
Upload and check the bill
Step 1: Upload the bill
Employees go to My WorkSubmit Invoice. Finance staff go to FinanceBills, or click “UPLOAD INVOICE / PO” at the top of the Finance workspace.
Drop the file on “Drop invoices here, or click to browse”. It uploads and is read straight away; there is no separate step to start the reading. You can drop several files at once.
Step 2: Check what Zonitix read
A card appears for the file under “Just uploaded”, showing the “Vendor”, “Amount”, “Invoice date” and “Category” it read. “Show text we read” opens the raw text.
If the reading was clean, the card says “With finance”. If not, it says “Held for review” and lists why: some fields were hard to read, the amount’s thousands or decimal separator was ambiguous, the invoice date was missing or unclear, no currency was found, there is no exchange rate for that currency yet, or it looks like a duplicate of an earlier bill.
Step 3: Fix anything it read wrong
On the card, click “Fix details or add a PO / note” (or “Add a PO number or note”). The “INVOICE DETAILS” window shows the original beside the fields. Correct “Vendor”, “Amount”, “Currency”, “Invoice date” or “Category”, add a “PO number” or a “Note to finance”, and click “Save changes”.
Changing what was read sends the bill back to finance to confirm. Adding only a PO number or a note does not.
Step 4: Finance confirms a held bill
Open FinanceFinanceReview. Held bills are listed under “HELD FOR REVIEW”. Pick one to see the extracted fields beside the original document; fields read with low confidence are outlined in red.
If the bill was held because its date was missing or unclear, the date you see may only be the day it was uploaded: set the real invoice date and save it. The same goes for an amount that was flagged. A held bill cannot be released until each flagged field has been saved.
Correct what is wrong, then click “Correct & commit”. That releases the bill so it can be submitted. “Save” keeps your corrections without releasing it, and “Discard (not an invoice)” removes a file that is not a bill. Every change is kept in the audit trail.
Approve it
Step 5: Check your approval rules
In FinanceFinanceSettings, “APPROVAL RULES” sets how many different people must approve a bill in each amount range. With no rules, every bill needs 1 approver. Click “Add rule” and set “Name”, “Minimum”, “Maximum” and “Required approvals”. Type an amount in “Preview amount” to see which rule applies. Changing rules needs the finance policy permission.
Step 6: Submit it for approval
Open the “Ledger” tab, find the bill, click the “Approval actions” icon on its row and choose “Submit for approval”. Whoever clicks this is recorded as the submitter.
Step 7: A different person approves it
The approver opens the “Approvals” tab. Each bill shows its “MATCH” result, its age under “SLA” (how long it has been waiting for a decision), and “APPROVERS” as approvals given out of approvals needed (for example 1 / 2). They click “Approve”, or “Reject” and type a “Reason for rejection”.
The bill stays in the queue until enough different people have approved it. A bill whose “MATCH” shows “EXCEPTION →” cannot be approved until the exception is resolved on the “Match” tab.
Step 8: Record the payment
Pay the vendor the way you normally do. Then, in the “Ledger” tab, open “Approval actions” on the bill and choose “Mark paid”. This must be someone who did not upload, submit or approve it.
Zonitix does not send money. “Mark paid” records that the bill was paid and books the payment in the ledger.
What you should see
In “My uploads” on the Submit Invoice page, the bill moves through “Held for review” (only if held), “With finance”, “In approval”, “Approved” and “Paid”. Open a row to see its history.
The person who uploaded it is notified when it is approved, rejected or marked paid, in Zonitix and by email if email is set up.
If something goes wrong
- "… was already uploaded as INV-… Delete INV-… first if you need to re-import it."
- The exact same file is already in Zonitix. Work with the existing bill instead of uploading it again.
- "Segregation of duties: the uploader cannot approve this invoice." (or "the submitter cannot approve their own request.")
- This is by design. Ask someone else with approval rights to approve it.
- "You have already approved this invoice — a different approver is required."
- Your approval counted. The approval rule needs more than one different person, so another approver must approve it too.
- "Confirm the invoice date before releasing — it was missing or ambiguous on upload (open the invoice in Review and save the date)."
- Zonitix could not read the invoice date with certainty, and the date decides which month the bill belongs to. Open the bill in Review, set the correct invoice date, save it, and release it again.
- "Accounting period … is locked — this invoice can no longer change."
- The bill is dated in a month that has already been closed. It can no longer be submitted, approved, rejected, corrected or deleted, even to change its date. Record the cost as an adjusting entry instead: see the guide to closing the month.
- "Duplicate invoice number … Reject one copy before submitting."
- Another bill from the same vendor has the same invoice number. Check whether it is a true duplicate and reject or delete one copy.
- A CFO TIER bill shows Reject but no Approve button.
- High-value bills need the dedicated invoice-approval permission, not just finance management. Ask an administrator to give the approver a role that includes it.
Still stuck? See When something goes wrong, or Contact Zonitix support.