This guide is the long version of how a practice runs supplier invoices for many client companies with Invoreg in front of their accounting software. It is written for the partner or practice manager setting the process up, and for the bookkeeper who will live in it. Each section links the short tutorial that shows the clicks. Read it once end to end; after that, the tutorials are enough.
The shape of the workflow
Every supplier invoice for every client follows the same four steps, whichever client it belongs to and however it arrived.
Inbox. The document reaches the client organisation's mailbox or is uploaded. Attachments are split, multi-page PDFs are handled as one document, phone photos are straightened, and the document joins the firm-wide queue tagged to its client.
Read. The AI fills the header (vendor, VAT number, document number, dates, currency, totals) and every line (code, description, quantity, unit price, VAT rate, line total). It proposes the account, tax rate and any project or cost object per line from that client's history with the vendor, checks the document against the queue and against your accounting software for duplicates, and flags anything it is not sure about. Around 37 seconds.
Check. A reviewer opens the document from the queue, looks at the flags and the previous invoices from the same vendor shown underneath, corrects what needs correcting, creates a missing vendor or item with the plus button, and, if the client has approvals configured, the approvers sign off. Around 11 seconds for a simple invoice.
Register. One click posts the bill to that client's accounting software with the coding per line. Every change from upload to registration is in the log: who, what, from, to.
The point of the design is that the reviewer works from one queue and never logs into a client's accounting software to key anything. The rest of this guide is about setting the pieces up so that stays true.
Setting up the firm
Start with the firm workspace, not with clients. Decide the roles: super-admins (usually partners and the practice manager), reviewers (bookkeepers), approvers (often client staff, sometimes a manager at the firm), and read-only users (an auditor, a client who wants to see status). Role permissions go down to individual features, so a role that can register bills need not be able to see contracts or bank operations. Set the roles once; assign them per organisation as clients are added.
Agree the labels the firm will use across all clients: for example a label per month-end status, one for "query with client", one for "awaiting approval". Labels are how the queue is filtered later, so keep the set short and identical for every client.
The tutorial on comments, tagging and permissions covers the role screen.
Adding a client organisation
Each client is an organisation: its own mailbox, coding history, approvers and accounting software connection, visible only to the users assigned to it.
Create the organisation with the client's legal name, VAT number and country. Connect your accounting software: authorise through OAuth (Invoreg asks only for the scopes it needs to read master data and post bills) and map the default accounts for purchases and VAT. Add the mailbox, and give the client the address; suppliers who already email the client's accounts inbox can be forwarded, or the client sets a rule so invoices go straight in. Upload the first invoice yourself, check it, register it, and confirm the bill in your accounting software. Five minutes; the getting started tutorial walks through each screen.
Two things worth doing on day one. Import or check the vendor list in your accounting software so that VAT numbers and legal names are correct; the AI matches on them. And decide the default account for each of the client's ten most frequent vendors; after that the history does the work.
Mailboxes and how documents arrive
The mailbox is the part clients notice, because it removes their job of downloading and forwarding. Three patterns work. The client gives the mailbox address to suppliers directly, so invoices never touch a human inbox. The client sets a forwarding rule on their existing accounts address. Or the firm forwards from its own inbox during a transition. All three can run at the same time; duplicates from overlapping routes are caught.
Photos of paper invoices taken with a phone can be emailed to the same address. Upside-down or skewed images are read; unreadable ones are flagged rather than guessed.
Coding rules and history
Invoreg does not ask you to write rules per vendor. It proposes the coding used the last time that vendor was booked for that client, and shows the previous invoices underneath so the reviewer can see the pattern. For a vendor whose lines always go to the same account, the proposal is right from the second invoice. For a vendor with mixed lines, such as a telecom bill with services and hardware, the per-line history is used, and the reviewer corrects the odd line rather than coding twenty-six.
Projects and cost objects follow the same approach when the client uses them in your accounting software. The reading and registering tutorial shows the fields and the flags.
Approvals: who, when, and when not
Turn approvals on per organisation, not firm-wide. One level is enough for most clients: the owner or finance manager approves before the bookkeeper registers. Two or three levels suit clients with a budget holder and a director, or a group with a shared service. Nothing registers until every configured level has approved, and the log shows who approved what and when.
Do not use approvals as the bookkeeper's own check; that is what the review step is for. Approvals are for the question "should this cost exist?", answered by someone at the client. The approvals tutorial shows the setup.
Duplicates
Suppliers send the same invoice by email, then by WhatsApp, then on paper after a reminder. Invoreg matches new documents against everything in the queue and against bills already in your accounting software. A duplicate is linked to its original and cannot be registered. The "already booked last month, uploaded again" case, which is the one that costs a double payment, is caught because the ledger is part of the comparison. See the duplicates, filters and search tutorial.
The daily routine
A reviewer's day is the queue. Filter to your clients, sort by oldest first, open, check, register, next. Flags go first; comments with @name go to a colleague or, through the client user, to the client, and the thread stays on the document. Anything waiting on someone else gets a label and drops out of the working view. At the end of the day the queue for your clients is empty or every remaining document has a label saying why.
For a firm with 40 clients and 1,500 invoices a month, that is roughly 70 documents a working day across the team, about an hour of reviewing, against 100 hours of typing.
Month-end
Month-end stops being a chase and becomes a set of filters. Documents by client and month with status unregistered: the list of what is outstanding, with the reason label on each. Duplicates filter: confirm the links. Deleted documents: check nothing was removed by mistake. Then the analytics: documents per day, time per registration, time saved, per client and firm-wide. The per-client view is what firms use to price fixed-fee bookkeeping honestly and to show a client what the month involved.
Bank matching is the next module; until it ships, payment matching stays in your accounting software.
Rolling it out across the client base
Do not migrate forty clients in a week. Start with three: one high-volume, one with a long-invoice vendor, one with approvals. Run them for a month with the old process in parallel for the first fortnight. Fix the vendor master data problems you find; there will be some. Then add clients in batches of five to ten, prioritising the ones whose scan allowance in their accounting software runs out or whose invoices are longest. Send each client the one-page note about the mailbox. By the third month the firm is on one queue.
What to measure
Three numbers, monthly: invoices registered, average time from upload to registration, and hours of bookkeeper time per hundred invoices. The first shows adoption, the second shows whether the queue is being worked, the third is the one to put in front of the partners. The cost calculator gives the baseline to compare against.
If you would rather see the workflow than read it, book a demo and bring ten real invoices from three clients; that is the walkthrough above, live.