Approvals

DocumentQ does not run a parallel approval system. It decides who should approve what, then submits through Business Central’s own approval framework — so approvers use Requests to Approve and the native purchase invoice page exactly as they do for anything else.

DocumentQ routes; Business Central remains the record of who decided. Approval state is read live from Business Central’s own approval entries every time it is needed, and is never copied onto the DocumentQ document.

1. Activate routing

Search → DocumentQ Approval Setup → Activate Approval Routing

This checks first for an approval workflow already running on this tenant. Afterwards, Approval Mode reads either:

• Full — DocumentQ routes.
• Deferred — an existing workflow already owns purchase approval, and is named on the page.

Business Central allows only one enabled workflow per document type. If the mode reads Deferred, that workflow must be disabled before DocumentQ’s routing can take effect. This is a Business Central constraint, not a DocumentQ one.

2. Create one route and one rule

DocumentQ Approval Routes and DocumentQ Approval Rules

The smallest working configuration is:

• A route with one level: Approver Kind = Named User, and the approver’s exact Business Central user name — not their display name and not their email address.
• One rule pointing at that route.

Two things about rules catch people out:

• Set the rule’s Lifecycle State to Published. A rule left at Draft is never evaluated, and nothing warns you about it.
• A rule with no criteria lines matches everything. That is useful as a first test, before you narrow it by vendor, amount, exception code and so on.

The walkthrough at set up approval routing does this end to end.

3. Submit and approve

Use Business Central’s own Send Approval Request on the purchase invoice. When the approver approves, the invoice is released and posting becomes possible — because DocumentQ’s own posting guard, which runs on every posting attempt, allows it.

Check that something actually routed

If no published rule matches a document, the submit can appear to succeed while nobody has actually been asked.

Open DocumentQ Approval Instances. A genuinely pending document shows a Rule Code and a Route Code. A blank pair means nothing routed.

To make that case stop rather than pass quietly, turn on No-Match Policy Guarded in the approval setup. Submission then fails with a clear error instead of succeeding silently. On any tenant where approval is a real control rather than a formality, turn it on.

Where approval is mandatory

For a reconciled, PO-backed document, approval is a policy choice — the posted receipt and purchase order are already the control.

For a manually coded non-PO invoice, approval is the control, standing in for the receipt that invoice will never have. Those documents cannot be posted without an approval, and DocumentQ reports plainly when nothing routed rather than letting them through.

An override or an authorized charge can also be configured to force a document into approval.

When an approver never hears about it

Both the submitter and the approver need a row in Business Central’s own User Setup with a valid email address. Without it, routing still works and the request still appears in Requests to Approve — the approver is simply never told.

Two current limits, stated plainly

• A document that was registered before approval routing was switched on cannot be submitted for approval from the user interface afterwards. There is no manual “submit this one now” action on any page.
• No approval request from DocumentQ has yet been observed reaching a real approver on a live tenant. The routing is built and the posting guard is in place; a first run on your own tenant is worth doing deliberately rather than discovering under time pressure.