Send Incoming Invoices for Approval

Business Central does not send a purchase document created from an incoming e-document for approval on its own. The import path does not raise the event the standard workflow listens to, so an electronically received invoice arrives postable while the same invoice typed by hand would need approval first. Setting Approval for Incoming Documents to Send for Approval closes that gap, using Business Central's own workflow.

Turn it on if approval is a control you rely on. Without it, e-invoicing quietly becomes the route around your approval policy.

Prerequisites

An enabled approval workflow for purchase documents. Without one, the app leaves the document alone and records why — it does not invent an approval. See Set Up an Approval Workflow for Purchase Documents if you do not have one yet.

Turn it on

Choose the Search icon, enter E-Invoice Platform Setup, and then choose the related link.
Under Incoming Documents, set Approval for Incoming Documents to Send for Approval.

Leave As Is is the other option, and the default: documents arrive as they always did.

Read what happened

The Approval column on Incoming Supplier Recognition records the outcome per document.

Outcome	What it means
Not requested	The setting was Leave As Is
Sent for approval	The request was raised; the document cannot be posted until approved
Approved immediately	Business Central approved it on the spot
No workflow enabled	Nothing happened, because no purchase approval workflow is enabled
Request failed	The request could not be raised; the document is still Open
Stuck without a request	The request failed halfway; see below
Raised	The request was raised, and Business Central left the document on a status of its own choosing
Already handled	The document was not Open when the app got to it

Two of these need reading properly.

No workflow enabled is recorded nowhere else in Business Central. If you switched the setting on and nothing is being approved, this is the column that tells you why:

The document was not sent for approval because no approval workflow for purchase documents is enabled. Set one up under Approval Workflows, or leave this setting on Leave As Is.

Approved immediately is not necessarily good news:

Sent for approval, and Business Central approved it on the spot — the document is now state and can be posted. That happens when the request lands on somebody who is allowed to approve their own, so check the approval user setup if you expected a second pair of eyes.

Repair a stuck document

The worst outcome is a request that failed halfway: the document sits on Pending Approval with no approval request behind it. Nobody can approve it, and Cancel Approval Request is unavailable on that state.

The approval request failed halfway. The document is now state, but no approval request was created — so nobody can approve it, and Cancel Approval Request is unavailable on that state. Use Reopen Stuck Document, on this row or on the purchase document itself, to put it back to Open.

To fix it, choose Reopen Stuck Document, either on the recognition row or on the purchase document — the action appears on the Purchase Invoice and Purchase Credit Memo pages only when a document is actually stuck.

Purchase document number is back to Open. Fix what made the request fail — most often the approver has no Salespers./Purch. Code — and send it for approval again.

That is the usual cause: where the workflow response has Approver Type set to Salesperson/Purchaser, the approver comes from Salespers./Purch. Code on Approval User Setup, and an empty value there breaks the request.

The action refuses on a document with a real request behind it, because reopening one of those would step around the approver:

This document has a real approval request waiting on somebody, so it is not stuck. Use Cancel Approval Request if you want to withdraw it — reopening here would step around the approver.

Keep an eye on it