ApprovalMax

What it does

ApprovalMax is approval software for Xero, QuickBooks Online and NetSuite that also reads supplier invoices.

The invoice-reading part is called Capture. Suppliers email bills to a dedicated ApprovalMax address, or you forward an existing mailbox to it, and ApprovalMax says Capture extracts fields "such as supplier, invoice number, amounts and tax".

The help centre says Capture codes a bill from history, picking the account "used most in the past for approved requests" from that supplier. Rules set per supplier can replace what it read with fixed values.

Since June 2026, according to ApprovalMax's feature releases page, Capture also reads the PO reference on a bill and matches it to the approved purchase order with the same reference, vendor and currency. The Xero and QuickBooks Online pricing pages list matching bills to purchase orders on Advanced and Premium, not Standard.

In October 2026 ApprovalMax added Approval Agent to its Advanced and Premium plans, and it says the agent compares each bill with that supplier's past bills and flags the ones that don't match. The company says Approval Intelligence, the AI layer the agent belongs to, "cannot approve or reject anything". For invoices, that's the split I recommend in back-office operations, where the agent routes each bill for approval or flags an exception.

Who it fits

ApprovalMax fits a business on Xero or QuickBooks Online where several people approve bills, the teams its Xero App Store listing describes as having "outgrown email approvals".

Plans come with unlimited users, and the QuickBooks Online pricing page lists multi-entity and location approvals on every plan.

Under ten people with one person approving, I think you'd be paying for a workflow you don't need yet. Once you do need it, approval routing on a standard ledger is the kind of software I'd buy rather than build.

Limitations

ApprovalMax's Capture page names bills as the only document type it reads for NetSuite.

I found no Sage or SAP connection on the pages I checked, so a business on Sage should start with the other invoice processing agents.

The help centre says Capture won't be able to find a new supplier automatically, and that you'll need to create it manually, in Xero or in ApprovalMax. Since codes come from past approved bills, I'd expect a new supplier's first bills to need coding by hand or a rule.

On Xero, Capture creates a separate request "for every valid file attached, regardless of whether it's an invoice or not", per the help article on email intake, so a supplier's terms and conditions arrive as a request with empty fields.

Advanced and Premium plans let some bills reach the ledger without a person approving them; both pricing pages describe auto approvals as a way to "Automatically approve requests which meet specific conditions".

ApprovalMax says it logs user activity but doesn't share those logs with customers.

In a June 2026 blog post, ApprovalMax says new customers in the UK, Australia and New Zealand start on plans sized by documents a month, while new customers in the EU, North America and other regions stay on the current model until the rollout reaches them "later this year".

The QuickBooks Online pricing page marks Capture "add-on required" on every plan. On the Xero page, the plan table says "Included in all plans", while the same page sells Capture as an add-on. Ask for a quote that names what's included.

I found no SOC 2 report, and the privacy policy doesn't say whether customer data is used to train AI models.