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Albury City enforces approval delegations on every invoice

With RapidP2P Accounts Payable Automation working alongside Civica Authority, Albury City now validates invoices and applies approval delegations before anything is processed for payment.
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Albury City Council invoice approval case study
Overview
The Challenge
The Solution
The Results
AlburyCity logo

Customer

Albury City

Industry

Location

Albury, NSW

Employees

Approx. 600 FTE

ERP

Invoice volume

Approx. 100 invoices per day

Website

alburycity.nsw.gov.au

Scope of Work

  • RapidP2P Accounts Payable Automation
  • Integration with Civica Authority
  • Invoice validation before the ERP
  • Delegation-based approvals and audit trail
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Overview

About Albury City

AlburyCity is the council for Albury, a regional NSW city of more than 57,000 people. Around 600 staff deliver services across 10 service clusters, with Civica Authority as the council’s ERP. Albury City introduced RapidP2P as part of a broader finance-system upgrade.

The Challenge

Approval controls relied on people, not the system

Around 100 invoices a day were routed to staff through the council’s records system, then keyed into Authority by hand. The records system couldn’t check whether an approver held the right delegation, so controls could be bypassed.

Delegations not enforced

Anyone could approve an invoice.

Weeks-long approvals

Invoices sat with approvers while suppliers waited to be paid.

No visibility for AP

AP couldn’t confirm whether an invoice had arrived.

Untraceable spend

Payment data couldn’t be linked to purchase orders, contracts or budgets.
“Approvals could bounce around for weeks when people were away or believed they weren’t responsible for those invoices. That caused a lot of delays and unhappy suppliers.”
— Elisha Lieschke, Team Leader Procurement Services, Albury City
The Solution

Invoices are checked before they reach the ERP, then approved in Authority

RapidP2P now sits between invoice receipt and Civica Authority. Every invoice is captured and checked before it moves into Authority, where it is approved under the right delegation and then posted and paid.

01 icon

Receive

All invoices arrive in one central mailbox.
02 icon

Capture

Invoice data is extracted automatically.
03 icon

Validate

Duplicates, invalid ABNs, incorrect bank details and PO mismatches are held as exceptions.
04 icon

Pass to Authority

Clean invoices are created in Civica Authority as held invoices, with the PDF attached.

Step 5

Approve

Approval follows Authority’s workflow, so only staff with the right delegation can approve, and every approval is recorded.

The Results

Stronger controls without replacing the ERP

Delegations are now enforced by the system, errors are stopped before they reach Civica Authority, and every approval leaves an audit trail. The checks have also surfaced errors in the council’s own supplier master file, such as expired ABNs and incorrect bank details.
APPROVAL CONTROLS

Delegations enforced in the system

What changed

Controls that once relied on people following the rules are now built into the AP process.

Delegations enforced

(Approval control)

Staff can only approve invoices within their delegation.

Errors stopped before payment

(Fraud and payment risk)

Duplicates, invalid ABNs and incorrect bank details are held before they reach Authority.

Audit-ready approvals

(Audit evidence)

Each approval is recorded in an audit trail.

Full invoice visibility

(Invoice status)

AP can see what has arrived, what’s in exceptions and what’s still outstanding.
visibility icon yellow
Support that adapts to council processes. A duplicate check requested by the AP team was switched on within a day, and the configuration was adjusted to catch GST and freight variances against purchase orders.
Once we had that direct link to Efficiency Leaders, it was a breath of fresh air. It really was, and it still is.
Rita Mills
Procure-to-Pay Project Officer, Albury City
It addresses a lot of system-based controls around segregation of duties, financial controls, delegations and preventing fraud and corruption risk. It’s a really important piece of software for us.
Elisha Lieschke
Team Leader Procurement Services, Albury City

Are your approval controls enforced by the system, or by people?

Book a demo to see how RapidP2P validates invoices before they reach your ERP, so approvals under your existing delegations only ever see clean invoices.
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