Invoice Manager journey guide
Follow Riverside's invoices (example organisation)
This guide walks the full Invoice Manager path using one illustrative story, not a customer case study. Riverside Facilities Group is a fictional mid-market business that buys from dozens of suppliers and processes a few hundred inbound invoices a month. You'll see what each area is for, why it exists, and how this example team would use it.
Riverside's supplier invoices arrive in a shared inbox from every kind of supplier: contractors, software vendors, office and equipment suppliers, and landlords. Everyone can see every email, so nobody clearly owns any of them. Supplier queries live in reply threads. A failed invoice looks just like a fine one until someone chases it. Approvals wait on whoever happens to open the folder. At month end, nobody can say what's outstanding without rebuilding it in a spreadsheet.
- Grace, AP clerk. She works the queue every day: her assigned invoices, queries and failures.
- Owen, AP team lead. He owns the workload, the approval rules and whatever is stuck.
- Priya, finance controller. She needs an honest picture of what's outstanding at close.
→ The big metaphor: a conveyor with named stops, not a shared inbox
A shared inbox has one state: unread or read. Invoice Manager gives every invoice a real position — captured, in review, in query, failed, approved, logged — and the position always tells you what to do next. Nothing waits in an undefined middle.
Where invoices start
My Invoices, Invoices and Starred hold the day-to-day work — what is assigned, what exists, and what you want to find again fast.
Where problems live in the open
In Query and Failed keep anything that cannot move forward visible, instead of quietly dropping it.
Where sign-off happens on rules, not memory
Approval Rules set the conditions; Approval Requests is the one place someone approves.
Where the record proves itself
Logs hold creation and processing history; Workspace Settings hold the configuration everything else depends on.
Sign in, then read the sidebar as four groups
Every screen in Invoice Manager sits inside the same sidebar. It is grouped exactly the way the work is grouped — Queues, Exceptions, Approvals, Activity (Logs), and Workspace (Settings). What you can see there follows what you are permitted to do; a hidden queue and a blocked queue are always the same thing.
My Invoices is the first thing you see after sign-in, on purpose — it is the queue you can act on immediately, without filtering anything else out first.
An AP clerk typically sees Queues and Exceptions. An approver additionally sees Approvals. Someone with audit access sees Activity. This is not a display setting — it is enforced the same way on every route.
Queues and Exceptions are both places invoices sit before a decision. Approvals is a decision. Activity is the record of decisions already made. The sidebar keeps those three ideas visually separate so a busy AP day never confuses "needs my attention" with "already handled."
Start where your assigned work lives
My Invoices scopes the full invoice list down to what is assigned to you. In this example, Grace, the AP clerk, opens it first every morning — and it is the only screen she needs for most of the day.
Grace has 14 invoices assigned. She does not need to know about the other 40 the team is holding — My Invoices already filtered those out. She works top to bottom: check the amount, check the PO, approve or flag.
1 Work the assigned list, not the whole inbox
Review status tracks whether a human has looked at the invoice; processing status tracks where it is mechanically. Combining both filters gets you, for example, "reviewed but not yet processed" in one view.
Search by supplier or invoice number when you know what you're looking for; page through the rest when you're clearing the list in order.
Anything Grace can't resolve on the spot moves to In Query instead of sitting unresolved in My Invoices.
Every inbound invoice, not just yours
Invoices is the unfiltered list — every inbound supplier invoice in this example, regardless of who it's assigned to. Owen, the AP team lead, uses it when he's reassigning work or checking volume across the small AP team.
Not a different screen, a different filter
Invoices uses the same columns, statuses and actions as My Invoices — it just isn't scoped to one person.
Planned, not yet live
Export from this view is on the roadmap. Today, Invoices is for scanning and acting, not extracting.
A team lead needs the whole picture to rebalance workload; an individual clerk only needs their own slice. Splitting the two screens means neither view is cluttered with the other's job.
Mark it once, find it in one click
Starred holds whatever you've flagged for quick return — a time-sensitive invoice, one you're waiting on a colleague for, or one you just don't want to re-search for tomorrow.
Grace stars an invoice for a recurring supplier contract, such as a lease renewal — one supplier among many. It stays out of her way in My Invoices until she needs it — then it's one click, not a re-search through hundreds of rows.
Waiting on a supplier, and everyone can see it
In Query is where an invoice goes the moment it needs a correction, a missing PO, or a clarification from the supplier. It is not a dead end — it is a holding queue with its own status, waiting to resolve back into the normal flow.
- A query lives in an email reply thread
- No one else knows the invoice is stuck
- The supplier chases twice, three times
- The invoice's status says exactly what it's waiting on
- Any team member can see and follow up
- Resolving it moves it straight back into the normal queue
Anything sitting In Query for more than a few days is a candidate for a direct follow-up rather than another email.
Could not be processed — and never buried
Failed holds invoices that hit a processing problem: a mismatch, a missing field, anything that stopped it going through cleanly. It sits in its own queue precisely so it never looks like a routine, successful row.
In Query is waiting on someone else — a supplier. Failed is waiting on your team to fix something internal. Mixing the two would hide which invoices this example team can resolve today without outside input.
Owen checks Failed at the end of each day. Anything genuinely blocked gets flagged to Priya; anything that was a data-entry slip gets corrected and re-run.
Sign-off in one place, not an inbox thread
Approval Requests lists every invoice currently waiting on a sign-off. Whoever the rules routed it to sees it here — not as an email they might miss, but as a queue with the same status logic as everywhere else.
Owen clears Approval Requests every Friday before the weekly close. Because the rules already decided which invoices land in front of him, he isn't re-deciding thresholds — he's just approving or rejecting.
Set the condition once, not the decision every time
Approval Rules is where the conditions live — the amount thresholds and criteria that decide which invoices need a second pair of eyes, and whose. Configure it once; every future invoice that matches routes itself.
In this example, Priya sets the £2,000 threshold once. Every invoice after that is judged by the same rule, not by whoever happened to glance at it — which is the difference between a policy and a habit.
The record that survives an audit question
Logs hold creation and processing history — meaning what happened, to which invoice, and roughly when. It's the answer to "who approved this?" that doesn't depend on anyone's memory.
Before the month-end close, Priya opens Logs to confirm nothing sat unresolved longer than it should have — a short check instead of rebuilding status from memory and screenshots.
Account and workspace preferences
Settings holds account-level configuration — the workspace preferences that sit alongside, but separate from, Approval Rules. In this example, Priya set these up once; day-to-day work stays in the queues.
You've now walked every queue Invoice Manager has. See it as one path in the full checklist, or jump straight back to whatever you use daily.
Riverside, end to end (illustrative)
Every stage of the journey, in the order an invoice actually moves, for this example team. Set up once, then work the queue daily.
- 1Sign in and land on My Invoices — start with what's already assigned to you.
- 2Check Invoices when you need the whole team's picture, not just your own.
- 3Star anything time-sensitive so it's one click away tomorrow.
- 4Route anything blocked on a supplier to In Query and follow up directly.
- 5Triage Failed before it becomes next week's backlog.
- 6Set Approval Rules once, so sign-off follows policy, not habit.
- 7Clear Approval Requests — the invoices the rules already routed to you.
- 8Check Logs before a close or an audit question — the answer is already there.
- 9Visit Settings only when the workspace itself needs to change.
Frequently asked
Is Invoice Manager for outbound billing or client invoicing?
No. It's built for inbound accounts-payable operations — reviewing and processing supplier invoices your organisation receives, not invoices you send out.
Is Riverside a real customer?
No. Riverside Facilities Group, and Grace, Owen and Priya, are an illustrative example used only in this guide to show how the queues fit together.
Where is our data held?
In the UK, by default, on every plan. Privacy and Terms are on the Quantum Foundry site.
How much does Invoice Manager cost?
Pricing depends on your team and invoice volume. Request a demo and we'll walk you through the product and share pricing.
Do we need a demo to start?
No. You can sign up and start with the invoices already in your inbox. If you'd rather see it first, request a demo with the Quantum Foundry team.
What's the difference between My Invoices and Invoices?
My Invoices is scoped to what's assigned to you. Invoices is the full, unfiltered list across the whole team — same table, wider scope.
What happens to an invoice once it's resolved from In Query or Failed?
It moves back into the normal queue flow with an updated status — nothing about being routed to an exception queue is permanent.
Who decides which invoices need approval?
Approval Rules does — conditions you configure once (like an amount threshold) automatically route matching invoices to Approval Requests.
Can I export invoice data?
Export is on the roadmap and currently disabled. Today the workspace is built for scanning and acting on invoices, not extracting them.
Is my access the same as everyone else's?
No — the sidebar and every route are permission-scoped. What you can't see is also what you can't act on, kept in step by design.