Approval is a signature on a total, not a check of the lines
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Approving an invoice records that someone senior agreed to pay it. It does not record that anybody compared the unit prices with the supplier's price list. The two are different acts, and in most small companies only the first one leaves a trace in the accounting system.
Price Double Check was built for the second act. The invoice and the list go to an email address and come back compared line by line, with the difference in euros where there is one. The approver still approves; what changes is that the total being signed has been tested against something other than memory.
What the software means by approval
In a small-company ledger a bill moves through three states: draft, awaiting approval, awaiting payment. Entering a bill and approving it are separate permissions, so the person who codes an invoice is not the person who releases the money. That is a real control and worth keeping. It governs who commits the company's funds, not whether the amount is the right one.
Larger systems are more honest about the ambiguity. The Dynamics 365 documentation lets the review sit on the invoice header, on the invoice lines, or on both. Header review is what gets configured, because the header is where the total is and the total is what the approver was asked about.
The thirty days exist for checking
The late payment directive assumes verification happens. It permits a procedure of acceptance or verification, by which conformity of the goods with the contract is established, and caps that procedure at thirty calendar days from receipt unless the contract expressly says otherwise. The clock is generous because somebody is expected to look.
In practice the looking takes under a minute. The invoice is opened, the supplier is recognised, the total is weighed against a rough sense of what last month cost, and it is approved. Conformity with the contract includes the price, and the only document that settles a price is the list the supplier sent.
Here is what a signature at that step honestly proves.
- That the company deals with this supplier: yes, if the approver knows the name.
- That the goods arrived: only when the delivery note is open on the desk beside the invoice, which it usually is not.
- That the total is plausible: yes, against recollection, which is the least reliable of the documents in the room.
- That each unit price matches the list in force: no. Nothing in the approval step opens a price list.
- That the pack behind the price is unchanged: no. Invoices do not print pack sizes, so a smaller box at the old price passes as normal.
One set of figures keeps this from being a matter of taste. In the acceptance run behind this service, 382 invoice lines from one real supply chain were compared with the lists that buyer had been sent, and 41 lines carried a genuine price difference, one of them 17.75% above the list in force. Those invoices had been approved and paid in the ordinary way, by someone competent who was not looking at a price list.
The distance between approving and checking is a routine, not a project. It starts at the same place as the seven controls ranked by what they catch per hour, and the first of them is simply having the current list where the invoice is.
Forward one invoice and the price list it should have been billed against, and the reply arrives by email well inside the thirty days the directive allows. The price and a sample reply are on the home page.