Business Central and Finance & Operations both handle sales and vendor invoicing natively, including approval workflows that route an invoice to the right person before it posts. What those workflows don't do on their own is get an incoming vendor invoice into the system in the first place; capturing it, reading it, matching it to a purchase order, is usually where manual work still lives.
Dynamics 365's approval workflow engine is genuinely solid: set rules once, by amount, by vendor, by department, and invoices route to the right approver without someone forwarding emails. That's a real, built-in capability, not something you need to bolt on.
What triggers that workflow is the problem. Someone still has to get the vendor's invoice out of an email inbox or a vendor portal and into Dynamics 365 as a record before approval routing can even start. If that vendor portal has no API, and plenty don't, pulling the invoice out automatically means browser-based automation that logs in and retrieves it the way a person would, not an API call.
When vendor invoices arrive by email or sit in a portal with no API, we build the capture step, pulling the invoice and its line-item data into Dynamics 365 automatically, so the native approval workflow has something to route the same day the invoice shows up.
If expense management runs partly in Dynamics 365 and partly in whatever people actually use to submit receipts, we connect the two so approved expenses land in the right place without someone re-keying totals.
Tell us how invoices currently reach your team, and whether the source has an API. We'll scope out what's buildable.
Tell us where your vendor invoices actually come from, email, a portal, somewhere else, and whether there's an API on that end or not. We'll figure out how to get them into Dynamics 365 without someone retyping line items. And if invoicing isn't your real bottleneck, we build automation around whatever process actually is.
Let's talk →Yes, both Business Central and Finance & Operations include configurable approval workflows that route invoices to the right person based on rules like amount or department, before the invoice posts.
The approval routing is automatic once an invoice exists as a record in the system. Getting an incoming invoice from a vendor's email or portal into that record in the first place usually isn't automatic out of the box, and is the part that typically needs custom automation built on top.
Yes, both platforms include expense management functionality for submitting and approving employee expenses. Whether it fits how your business actually tracks and reimburses expenses, including connecting to whatever tool employees use to submit receipts, is a separate question from whether the feature exists.
To a meaningful degree, yes. Matching incoming payments to open invoices is a rules-based task that automation handles well once the payment data is reachable through Finance & Operations' API or bank feed, though exceptions and partial payments usually still need a person to review them.