Every bill approved by the right person. Before it reaches your ledger.
- Site managerApprovedTue 09:14
- FinanceApprovedTue 11:02
- Director · over $5,000Awaiting
An approval workflow and accounts payable engine for businesses running on Xero. The bill is read, matched, approved against your delegated authority and posted. Your accounting software stays where it is and stays the system of record. Balance is the control that sits in front of it.
- Under $1,000
- Cost centre owner
- $1,000 to $5,000
- Cost centre owner, Finance
- Over $5,000
- Cost centre owner, Finance, Director
- Any capital item
- Director, Board
Approval you can prove, not approval you remember.
Approvals that match your delegations
Multi step approval chains that mirror your real delegated authority. Route on amount, cost centre, entity, supplier or account code. Approvers act from email or phone and never need a licence for your accounting software.
The invoice is read, not retyped
Supplier invoices arrive by email or upload and come back as structured data down to the line item. Quantities, unit prices, GST and account codes. No per supplier templates to build and maintain.
Matched before it is paid
Three way matching across the purchase order, the goods received and the supplier invoice. Price and quantity variances outside tolerance are held and flagged rather than quietly paid.
An audit trail you can hand over
Who approved what, when, and what they were looking at when they did. Exportable for any period. Self approval and separation of duties are enforced by the system, so the policy holds even when people are busy.
From a supplier email to an approved bill, in five steps.
- Step 01
Capture
Suppliers email invoices straight to your Balance address, or your team uploads them. Every document is stored against the supplier and the period it belongs to.
- Step 02
Read
Header and line item data is extracted, coded against your chart of accounts and matched to the supplier record. You review, you do not retype.
- Step 03
Match
The invoice is matched to its purchase order and its delivery. Anything outside your tolerance is held for a human to look at.
- Step 04
Approve
The bill routes through the chain your policy defines. The approver sees the document, the coding and the remaining budget at the moment they decide.
- Step 05
Post
Once the last approval lands, the bill and its coding are pushed to your accounting software with the source document attached.
Everything the approval has to touch.
Purchase orders
Raise and approve the order before the commitment is made. Committed spend shows against budget from the moment the order goes out, not when the invoice turns up six weeks later.
Bill approvals
Multi step chains on amount, cost centre, entity, supplier and account code. Auto approval for low value and trusted suppliers. Delegation so approvals keep moving when somebody is on leave.
Budget control at the point of decision
The approver sees the budget line, what is already committed and what is left, before they approve. Budget is a control rather than a month end surprise.
Expense claims and credit notes
Staff claims, reimbursements and supplier credit notes run through the same policy, the same chain and the same audit trail as everything else.
Supplier statement reconciliation
Match a supplier statement against what you have recorded, so missing invoices and duplicates surface before they become a payment problem.
Multi entity
One approval policy across several entities and several accounting organisations. Approvers only ever see what belongs to them.
What actually changes.
- Today
Bills land in a shared inbox and get forwarded around for approval.
With Setara BalanceBills arrive at one address and are read and coded automatically.
- Today
The approval lives in an email thread nobody can find six months later.
With Setara BalanceEvery approval is a named step with a timestamp and the document attached.
- Today
Coding is keyed into the ledger by hand, and again if there is a purchase order.
With Setara BalanceCoding is extracted once, approved once and pushed once.
- Today
Spend is checked against budget at month end, after it has already happened.
With Setara BalanceBudget position is on the screen at the moment of approval.
- Today
The auditor asks who approved this, and finding out takes a week.
With Setara BalanceAny approval can be produced in seconds, with what the approver saw.
- Today
Someone approves their own invoice and nobody notices.
With Setara BalancePolicy blocks self approval and holds separation of duties.
Built for the places approval actually gets hard.
Multi site hospitality and retail
High invoice volume across many suppliers, with site managers who need to approve without ever touching the ledger.
Construction and trades
Purchase orders raised per job, subcontractor invoices matched to them and committed cost visible against the project budget.
Not for profit and member organisations
Board and committee delegations, fund and grant coding, and an audit trail that stands up at the annual audit.
Professional services
Cost centre approvals, partner delegations, and staff expense claims on the same policy as supplier bills.
Healthcare and aged care
Consumables ordered across sites on thin margins, with strict delegations that cannot be worked around.
Growing SMEs
A finance team of one or two carrying an approval process that currently runs on email, memory and goodwill.
It works with the ledger you already have.
Balance controls the spend. Insights explains it.
Setara Insights answers plain English questions about your numbers straight out of your ledger. Setara Balance decides what is allowed into that ledger in the first place. Run them together and the answer and the control come from the same place.
Approval evidence that holds up.
- Dedicated database per client
- TLS 1.3 in transit, AES-256 at rest
- MFA required for every account
- Data stays in your region
- Role based access and separation of duties
- Immutable approval audit log