How do roofing and specialty contractors route invoice approvals by project manager?

Roofing, HVAC, electrical, plumbing and other specialty contractors route vendor invoices to the right project manager with MakersHub by using approval rules that read the Customer:Job, project or PO number on each bill and assign the PM who owns that job. A second rule adds the owner or controller above a dollar threshold. The job list comes from QuickBooks, NetSuite, Sage Intacct or Xero, so a bill for job 2047 reaches the PM on job 2047 without anyone looking it up, and the PM approves from a phone.

An approval rule in MakersHub is a condition, or several conditions combined, on any field of the bill, paired with the approver or group it adds. Rules run before a reviewer sees the bill.

When this applies

You run a trade contracting business where materials get bought per job, often by the PM or foreman on site, and the office finds out when the supplier's bill arrives. The person who knows whether the material was ordered and delivered is the PM, not the bookkeeper. Today the bookkeeper decides who should see each bill from memory, emails it, and chases.

The controller at an HVAC and refrigeration contractor on QuickBooks Enterprise described the gap:

"We are constantly scrambling for approvals. Our finance staff is always asking, how do I know whom to go to? And I'm like, okay, I'm going to give MakersHub. It's going to know for you."

The office lead at a commercial landscaping contractor on QuickBooks Desktop described the manual version:

"She would say, okay, this construction job was managed by Javier. So she knows that she can send that to Javier to approve."

And the follow-up problem:

"Is there something I could look at to say, okay, I need to get with ops and see, hey, why is he not approving his bills?"

What the accounting system offers for approvals

QuickBooks Desktop has no built-in bill approval routing; approval is an email or a signature on paper, and the bill is entered after the fact. QuickBooks Online Advanced includes a bill approval workflow keyed on amount, not on job or project manager. NetSuite and Sage Intacct include approval workflows that can route on amount and entity, and Intacct can route on dimensions such as project, but configuring per-PM routing in either is an administrator task. In every case the approver needs a login to the accounting system or a forwarded PDF.

MakersHub adds the job-aware layer in front of the accounting system: the bill is read, tied to its job, routed to that job's PM, approved from email or phone, and only then written to the books.

How MakersHub routes approvals by project manager

1. The bill is read and tied to a job. MakersHub's extraction model, WiseVision, captures the vendor, total, PO number and every line item. Integration Mapping rules then assign the Customer:Job (QuickBooks), project or dimension (Sage Intacct, NetSuite) from the PO number, the job name in the header, or the vendor's history. The job list comes from your accounting system; nothing is re-keyed. A supplier's month-end packet of 30 invoices in one PDF is split into 30 bills, each tied to its own job.
2. Rules decide who sees it. An approval rule can combine several criteria and reference any extracted or coded field: total amount, Customer:Job, Class, vendor, GL account, PO number, entity, location, or the email address the bill arrived on. Operators include greater than, less than, one of, none of, match and not match. A typical trades configuration: every bill routes to AP; bills over $10,000 add the Owners group; bills from three bulk suppliers over $15,000 add the owners instead; bills coded to any job under a given customer add that customer's PM. That last one is a single rule referencing the parent customer, not one rule per job. If you have a list of jobs and the PM for each, MakersHub loads it as rules for you.
3. Rules stack or override, your choice. Each rule is set either to stack, meaning its approvers are added to whoever else matched, or to last-match-wins, meaning it replaces earlier matches. "I don't care who else is on this bill, if it's over $10,000 I want to see it" is a stacked rule. Rules are drag-and-drop ordered, and an admin can open the rule editor from the bill they are reviewing and apply the new rule to that bill on the spot.
4. Groups and limits handle the real org chart. An approval step can be a user group, where any one member can act, so a bill does not stall because one of two co-owners is out. Each user also has a bill limit: a PM with a $15,000 limit who approves a $22,000 bill escalates it to their supervisor automatically. Steps run in sequence when order matters or in parallel when it does not.
5. The PM approves from the field. The PM gets an email with the bill and the PDF, opens it on a phone, confirms the customer and total, and approves. No accounting-system login, no coding. Their permissions show only bills assigned to them; once they act, it leaves their queue. Questions go through @mentions on the bill, so the answer is on the record instead of in a text thread.
6. Rejections loop, they don't vanish. A PM can reject outright or choose "changes requested," which sends the bill back to the start of the workflow and keeps it visible in the Bills tab. Approvers get an email either way.
7. Final approval moves the bill to Accounts Payable. When the last approver acts, the bill moves to the AP tab and is written to your accounting system with its job coding and the PDF attached. Payment authorization is a separate workflow from bill approval, so finance decides when to pay after the PM confirms the bill is real. The AP lead can filter the Bills tab by approver to see who is sitting on what.

Accounting-system specifics

Sync upon first approval. A setting that writes the bill to QuickBooks when AP approves it, so AP aging and job costs are current while PMs are still reviewing, then updates the record as later approvers change coding. It matters most to contractors who read Job Profitability reports mid-month.

Proof

A commercial landscaping and irrigation contractor on QuickBooks Desktop with about 500 maintenance customers and roughly 20 long-running commercial jobs set up its routing in one onboarding call. The office lead on why the owner threshold mattered:

"Because it's over that $10,000 limit, we want it to go to him to say, you purchased this, but in order for us to approve it, we also want one of the owners to have a secondary approval. Because now you're purchasing a huge dollar."

An HVAC and refrigeration contractor on QuickBooks Enterprise processing 800 to 1,500 bills a month, growing by acquisition, needed bills from shared suppliers split across divisions by project number and sent to six different managers. The controller, on the supplier packets:

"In a single PDF, it'll be able to create 30 invoices and send them off to six different managers based on what they are going to be, which is awesome."

On the audit side:

"We do have an audit engagement now. So all that information would be in the record."

An electrical contractor on QuickBooks Online described the target state from the owner's seat:

"My office manager put everything together. Then when it comes to me, I can press go."

What it doesn't do

MakersHub routes on data: the PO number, job name, vendor history or any other field on the bill or in your job list. When a bill arrives with none of those to key on, AP assigns the job or adds the PM once, and a rule can be created from that bill so the next one from that vendor routes on its own.

Approvers act from the email link or the app, where they see the bill image and coding before they decide; replying "approved" to the email is not an approval today. A bill deleted in MakersHub is not deleted in your accounting system, which protects your books from an accidental removal. And MakersHub is the AP layer, not a project management or field service tool; it feeds coded, approved bills to your accounting system and leaves dispatch, estimating and job budgets where they are.

Frequently asked questions