For finance
Approve it because it’s right. Not because it’s due.
An energy invoice arrives as a total and a payment date, and the approval it asks for is an act of trust in a number nobody in the building assembled. Here is what happens to it before it reaches you.
Before it reaches you
The bill is already rebuilt when it arrives on your desk.
Not flagged, not sampled, not compared against last month. Rebuilt from the contract, the meter data and the rate the industry published for that date.
What cannot be priced yet is held rather than passed. Some published figures are provisional by design and settle months later, and a system that treats a missing rate as a zero produces a confident total that is wrong in the one direction nobody checks.
The decision
Nothing is paid on hope, and the default says so.
Your organisation chooses whether a bill that failed validation is withheld from the payment run, or paid on time while the difference is pursued as a credit.
The default is to withhold, so an organisation that never opens the setting never quietly pays a bill the engine failed. Paying on time and chasing the credit is the other honest answer, and on a supplier that charges late-payment interest it is often the cheaper one.
Either way it is a position somebody took and can point at, rather than whatever the person doing the payment run happened to do that month. Overriding a failed bill takes a reason, and the reason is kept beside the evidence it overrode rather than replacing it.
What leaves
A file your ledger can take, and a run you can undo.
Approved invoices export with the columns an administrator defines. A test run produces the file without committing anything; the real run marks the bills exported so they cannot go a second time.
A committed run can be voided, which returns its bills to approved and leaves the run itself in the history. An exported or paid bill cannot be walked back to approved through the ordinary control at all: the state machine refuses it, because that is the path by which an invoice gets into two payment runs.
There is no named accounting integration. The export is a file, not a connector, and it does not know anything about your ledger. That is worth saying plainly, because the question is usually asked after the decision rather than before it.
Month end, and the year
The accrual and the budget are the same arithmetic as the check.
A budget assembled in a spreadsheet and a bill checked by software are two different calculations, and the variance between them is an argument about method rather than about energy.
Accruals price every unbilled period through the engine that validates the invoices. Where a period has no metered data the estimate falls back to standing and capacity charges only, which understates, and the run states that rather than presenting a confident figure. Each run is frozen, so the number that went into a set of accounts is still readable after the real invoice replaced it.
The budget prices last year’s consumption at the rates in force now, through the same engine, and a month that genuinely will not look like last year can be overridden by hand and is marked as overridden. Approval locks the figures.
Finance approves energy invoices without having assembled the numbers on them, which makes approval an act of trust rather than a check. Simplest Energy rebuilds every invoice line by line from the contract, the meter data and the industry rates published for that date, before it reaches an approver. A bill that fails validation is withheld from the payment run by default, and a charge that cannot yet be priced, because its published rate is still provisional, is held rather than passed as correct. Approved invoices export as a file whose columns the organisation defines, and the run that produced it can be voided; an exported or paid bill cannot be returned to approved through the ordinary control, so an invoice cannot enter two payment runs. Month-end accruals and annual budgets are priced by the same engine that checks the invoices, so the plan and the check cannot disagree about method. There is no named accounting-system integration: the export is a file rather than a connector.
The controls a finance team asks about first.
The invoices you already approved are the fairest test of this.
Send a year of them. We will rebuild every line from the rates that were published at the time and show you what agreed, what did not, and what could not be settled either way.