Most mid-size finance teams already have an approval matrix for supplier invoices. Amount bands, cost centre owners, a second pair of eyes above a threshold. Then customer invoices get a different story: a spreadsheet, a Slack ping, or no formal sign-off before the PDF leaves the building.
That split is expensive. Policy lives in two places. Audit trails diverge. New joiners learn one process for payables and invent another for receivables. When e-invoice issuance tightens, the gap becomes visible fast.
One orchestration layer, two directions
Cortena runs payables and receivables in the same workspace on the same data model. The Workflow Builder is not a payables-only canvas. It routes invoice work by the conditions you set, whether the invoice is money out or money in.
- Payables: nothing posts to the ledger until the required people sign off.
- Receivables: nothing issues as ZUGFeRD / Factur-X until the required people sign off.
- Both keep reject-with-reason, delegation, and a per-invoice activity log.
Shared workflows do not mean identical rules. They mean one place to enforce different rules.
Design the control points on purpose
Some teams approve every supplier invoice. Others only review what the agent flags. On receivables, sales ops may approve commercial drafts while finance signs off above a threshold before issue. The matrix should encode that, not rely on memory.
Because the canvas is visual, finance can read the path without opening a ticket with IT. Branch on entity, amount, customer class, or agent confidence. Keep humans where judgement matters. Let the rest move.
Archive where your books already live
Approvals are not the archive. In Germany the booking trail typically lands in DATEV. In the Netherlands teams often hand off to Exact Online or Twinfield. Elsewhere the same pattern holds: Cortena prepares and controls, your accounting system remains the system of record.
What good looks like in a demo
Bring one supplier invoice and one customer invoice. We build both paths in the Workflow Builder, show where humans stay in the loop, and walk the handoff into your ledger. Same matrix family. Two directions of cash.