Cost invoice workflow after KSeF - how to organise approval

Poland's national e-invoicing system, KSeF, solved a problem accounting teams had for years: a cost invoice now arrives in one place, in one format, with no PDF in an email and no retyping of numbers. What it did not solve is what happens to the invoice afterwards. Who checks it, who approves it, which project it should be booked to, and what to do when the approver is on holiday. This post is about that second part: how to organise cost invoice approval so that it does not drift back into email. An electronic cost invoice workflow should define who approves a document, which amount limits apply, how deputies work and when the invoice reaches the ERP. We build such a workflow in a pilot programme, but the rules below work regardless of the tool.

What KSeF changed, and what it did not

From 2026 invoices from Polish suppliers reach the company through the national e-invoicing system; the dates for each group of companies are in our KSeF deadline checker. The data is structured from the start: seller, line items, amounts, payment terms. That is the end of retyping from a PDF. But KSeF does not know that the steel invoice belongs to project P-31, that anything above PLN 10,000 must be seen by a director, or that the production manager has a deputy. In many companies this stage looks like this today: the bookkeeper downloads the invoice from KSeF, emails it to a manager, the manager replies with an OK, and then the bookkeeper enters everything into the ERP by hand. Exactly what KSeF was meant to eliminate, just one step further down the line.

Three questions an invoice workflow must answer

Who should receive it? Based on supplier, amount and project. A regular utility supplier goes to administration, a project invoice to the project manager, anything above a set amount additionally to a director. These rules have existed in the company for years; they have just never been written down. Who is responsible for what? Substantive approval (the service was delivered, the amount is right) is different from budget approval (we have the money for this) and different again from release for posting. One person may do all three, but each should leave a trace. What if someone is away? A deputy for holidays, sick leave and business trips, set up in advance, not in a panic when the payment deadline passes.

What a well-designed approval path looks like

• Pre-coding from rules. The system proposes the cost centre, project and category based on the supplier and history. The approver corrects it if needed instead of filling in an empty form.
• Amount limits. Up to PLN 5,000 one person, above that two, above PLN 50,000 a director. The thresholds are set by the company, not the software vendor.
• Automatic deputies. The invoice goes to the deputy, and the history shows who approved on whose behalf and when.
• Comments on the invoice. The question of whether this has already been invoiced stays with the document, not in a separate email thread.
• A view of where things are stuck. A list of invoices in circulation with waiting time per person, and a reminder before the payment deadline passes.
• Export to the ERP after approval. With coding and decisions, via API or an import file. No second entry.

Invoices outside KSeF

Foreign invoices, receipts, credit notes and documents from companies not yet covered by the obligation still arrive by email or on paper. A good workflow takes them along the same path: data is entered by hand or read from the PDF, and then the document goes through the same approvals. The important thing is not to end up with two parallel workflows, one for KSeF and one for everything else. We cover reading data from PDFs on our page about AI solutions for documents and invoices.

Is this not just an ERP module?

Often it is. If your ERP has an invoice workflow that the team actually uses, tune it instead of standing up a second system. A separate workflow makes sense when the ERP has no such module, when it is priced per user and thirty managers cost more than the whole rollout, or when the approvers are people who should not have access to the ERP at all. We described the pitfalls of connecting systems in our post on integrating ERP, accounting and e-commerce.

Where to start

By writing down the rules you already carry in your heads: who approves which invoices, above which amount a second signature is needed, who stands in for whom. That is one sheet of paper and an hour with the bookkeeper and two managers. Then count how many cost invoices pass through the company each month and how many people approve them. With a dozen invoices and one approver, the inbox in your accounting software is enough. With a few hundred and several departments, the written rules become the configuration of a system. We build exactly that kind of cost invoice workflow as custom software: retrieval from KSeF, coding, routing, multi-level approval, deputies and export to the ERP. Describe how approval works in your company today in our quote calculator: you get a ballpark instantly and a reply from a human within 24 hours.