Invoice approval setup

The pieces at a glance

Approval setup spans three records:

Together these settings decide who gets the request, how they receive it, and what happens if they don't action it in time.

Customer-level settings

Open the customer's profile and click Edit. Scroll to the Invoicing section.

Approval method (channel)

Five options. The customer's preferred channel applies whenever the customer themselves is acting as an approver.

Auto-approval limit

The auto-approval limit decides whether a request is sent at all. It has three states:

• All invoices auto-approve — every invoice for this customer skips the approval workflow and goes straight to Approved. No request is sent. Useful where the participant has explicitly delegated approval to your team.
• Auto-approve below a threshold (e.g. $250) — invoices under the dollar threshold auto-approve; invoices at or above it go through normal approval. The most common setup — small routine claims don't need a chase, larger ones do.
• Never auto-approve — every invoice waits for a human action, regardless of amount.

Auto-approval delay

Even when an approver is configured, Navigator can auto-approve invoices that haven't been actioned within a set number of business hours — set per customer or inherited from the account default.

Two practical things to know:

• Business hours, not wall-clock hours. The delay extends across weekends — a 48-hour delay starting Friday afternoon won't fire until the following Tuesday.
• Customer-level overrides account default. Leaving this blank inherits the account-level setting. Set a value here only if this customer needs a different timeline.

Contact-level settings

A contact (a nominee, support coordinator, or family member) can be configured to approve invoices on a customer's behalf. Two pieces of configuration:

Approval method on the contact record

On the contact's own record, set their preferred Invoice approval method. Same five options as the customer (Email, Kismet App, SMS, Phone, None). This is set once per contact — the same contact attached to multiple customers uses the same channel for all of them.

Marking a contact as an approver for a specific customer

The flag that turns a contact into an approver for a particular customer lives on the link between them — not on the contact record itself. From the customer's profile:

1. Open the customer's profile and find their Contacts section.
2. Click the contact you want to set up as an approver.
3. In the modal, tick Invoice approver.
4. Save.

Without this flag set, the contact stays linked to the customer for context (calls, emails) but doesn't receive any invoice approval requests.

How Navigator decides who gets the request

When an invoice is created and ready for approval, Navigator builds a list of approvers:

1. Start with the customer. If their Approval method is anything other than None, they're added to the list — the request goes via their preferred channel.
2. Add every approver contact. Any contact linked to this customer with Invoice approver ticked is added — each via their preferred channel (which can differ from the customer's).
3. Send to all of them simultaneously. If three approvers are configured, all three get the request. Navigator doesn't wait for one before notifying the next.
4. First action wins. An approval (or rejection) from any one approver moves the invoice. Once one person actions it, the others' requests no longer matter.

What happens after approval or rejection

The approver approves

• Invoice status moves to Approved
• The approval is timestamped on the invoice with the approver's identity
• The other approvers' pending requests are no longer actionable — first action wins
• The invoice is now eligible to be picked up for the next NDIS submission extract

The approver rejects

• Invoice status moves to Rejected
• A task is created and assigned to whoever created the invoice, with the rejection reason captured
• The supplier is notified by email (if your account has supplier rejection notifications enabled). See Invoice rejection notice
• The supplier can resubmit a corrected version

Nobody actions it

The auto-approval delay starts from the moment the request is sent. Once the configured business hours pass:

• If auto-approval is allowed for this invoice (under the limit, or limit set to "all invoices"), Navigator auto-approves it. The invoice moves to Approved with the system as the approver
• If auto-approval is disabled (limit set to "Never auto-approve"), the invoice stays at Pending Approval indefinitely until someone actions it manually

Defaults that surprise people

Six behaviours that often catch new team members out:

• Phone channel skips the auto-approval timer. Phone approvals require human contact, so Navigator doesn't auto-approve them when the timer expires. Instead, a follow-up task is created so your team can chase.
• "Never auto-approve" really means never. The invoice will sit at Pending Approval forever unless someone actions it manually. There's no fallback after a long delay.
• Reimbursements skip approval entirely. When the customer is also the supplier (a reimbursement claim), Navigator auto-approves regardless of the approval settings.
• Self-supplier claims also skip approval. Where the supplier is the same business entity as the plan manager, the invoice auto-approves.
• Per-customer delay overrides the account default. Leave the customer-level delay blank to inherit; set a number to override.

Permissions

Editing approval setup requires the customer.update permission. This is the same permission needed to edit anything else on a customer record. Marking a contact as an invoice approver uses the same permission since it's set on the customer-contact link.

Approvers themselves don't need any Navigator role — they receive the request via their configured channel and approve through that medium (link in email, button in app, reply to SMS).