Invoices With No Purchase Order

A one-off invoice with no purchase order and no contract — emergency repairs, a professional fee, tree removal after a storm — is supported, and is handled differently on purpose.

Read this before using this path

DocumentQ’s central safety property — a wrong number on the PDF can cause an exception, but not a wrong posting — depends on there being a purchase order and a posted receipt to check against. A non-PO invoice has neither.

If this path posts something, the figure in your ledger is the figure a person entered after reading the invoice. The product does not hide this: it is exactly why the extra steps below exist, and why the document stays marked afterwards.

1. Find it

The document will be sitting at Exception with ERR-NO-AUTHORITY (nothing at all stands behind this invoice) or ERR-NO-CONTRACT (non-PO spend with no active authorizing contract).

ERR-NO-AUTHORITY is ranked as informational rather than as a matching failure, because nothing has actually gone wrong — there was simply nothing to check.

2. Code and Submit for Approval

AP Document card → Code and Submit for Approval

The Workspace shows a banner sending you here; this page lives on the native card, not in the Workspace.

You get the invoice’s own extracted lines shown read-only for reference, beside an empty grid where you enter the G/L account, dimensions, description and amount, line by line.

Nothing is pre-filled from what the AI read. The model may describe what it saw; it does not get to put a number into a field you might approve without reading. That is a deliberate design choice, not an omission.

3. Watch the cross-check

The page shows the claimed grand total, the claimed net of tax, your coded total, and a live cross-check between them.

If your coded total and the claimed total disagree, you must type an override note before you can proceed. There is no purchase order or receipt to check this claim against, so the claimed total is the only cross-check available — and the refusal message says exactly that.

4. Register and submit — approval is not optional here

Register & Submit for Approval builds the Business Central purchase invoice from the lines you entered, and immediately submits it for approval through the same routing described in approvals.

Approval is the authority standing in for the posted receipt this invoice will never have, so a manually coded invoice cannot be posted without it.

If nothing routed — because no approval rule covers this document — DocumentQ tells you so plainly and keeps the document blocked from posting until an administrator adds a rule. A manually coded document reads as Not Submitted rather than Not Required even when no rule matched, so the posting guard keeps refusing.

5. It stays marked, permanently

The document carries a Reconciliation Basis of Manually Coded, styled differently from a reconciled document. The mark stays on the record after posting, so an auditor looking at a posted entry months later can see it was never verified against a purchase order or receipt.

This is the one field that separates the two trust classes, and it is the one the approval gateway depends on.

If the spend is recurring, use a contract instead

For rent, retainers, subscriptions and similar predictable non-PO spend, set up a row in AP Contracts with its cap and period. Those invoices are then checked against the contract — an actual authority — rather than needing to be coded by hand every month.

A contract-backed invoice that exceeds its period cap, or falls outside its period, raises ERR-CONTRACT-LIMIT rather than passing quietly.

The other non-order kinds

Manual coding is for genuinely unanticipated spend. Two other document kinds have their own authority to check against and do not need it:

• Prepayment — checked against a purchase order carrying authorized prepayment terms. Without one, ERR-NO-PREPAY-AUTH.
• Credit memo — checked against the original posted invoice it references, and may not exceed it, in total or per line. Without a resolvable original, ERR-CREDIT-NO-ORIGIN; over the original, ERR-CREDIT-EXCEEDS.

See credit memos, prepayments and recurring contracts for what each one is actually checking.