Using AppFolio? Test AP automation on bills already sitting in your Payables.

Invoices reach an AppFolio shop by several roads: PDFs emailed or uploaded, invoices a vendor files through the Vendor Portal, paper someone scans. Each one ends up as a bill under Accounting and Payables, with a payee, a reference number, a bill date and a due date, then lines carrying a property, a GL account and an amount, and often a work order. Typing it takes a minute. Choosing the property, the account and the split is what eats the morning.

For the test, AI reads copies of bills your team has already saved, together with the invoices behind them, and writes each one up as an AppFolio bill draft. Beside every property, account and work order it gives the reason for the choice. It enters nothing and pays nobody. Your reviewer compares each draft with the saved bill and marks every difference.

Before the bill: which road the invoice took. AppFolio's Vendor Portal lets a vendor upload an invoice made in another tool or build one from billable line items, mark an assigned job Work Done, and upload a W-9 or liability insurance when you ask for it. So a single plumber may file a portal invoice against a work order on Tuesday and email a PDF of the same invoice on Thursday. The draft records which road each invoice came by, ties portal invoices to the work order they answer, and flags a second copy arriving the other way.

Allocations instead of six lines. A bookkeeping firm's AppFolio guide describes the Allocate box on bill entry: choose an Allocation Type such as Even Spread, pick a property group, owner or portfolio, and one charge lands on every property in it. That only works when the group already exists and the split really is even. A landscaping contract priced community by community is not. The draft says when an even spread matches what your desk did, and when the bill needs a share typed per property, naming the group or listing each share.

Money already spoken for. A rental property's bills are paid from its owner's cash, and some of that cash is already promised. The same firm's guide to AppFolio's Trust Account Balance report has you add columns for unpaid bills, the property's reserve amount, unused prepayments and, for shops that use them, work order estimates. When you send estimates, the draft compares each repair bill with the estimate on its work order and lists the gap. Whether the owner's cash covers it stays with whoever runs Pay Bills.

Approval flows key on coding. AppFolio announced Bill Approval Flows in October 2024, routing bills by vendor type, GL account or amount, and its Summer 2025 update added purchase order approvals routed by dollar amount, GL code or budget. Both read fields the draft fills in, so a bill coded to the wrong GL account can travel to the wrong approver. From the rules you send, the draft names the flow each bill should enter, and your reviewer checks that against where the real bill went. It approves nothing.

Corporate books and the vendor record. Management companies often run their own books in AppFolio too. AppFolio's association accounting page describes bills and invoices between corporate and property books, and billing associations back for management fees, admin work, vendor bills and common area costs. The copier lease and a community's pool repair can come from one vendor in one week, so the draft keeps corporate bills and bill-backs apart from property bills. Each payee also carries what your vendor list says about W-9s, which feed the 1099-NEC reporting AppFolio supports. Your reviewer, usually the AP lead, watches allocations, bill-backs and payees hardest, because those decide whose money pays.

If the drafts meet the success criteria, new invoices get the same treatment for about 30 days.

A person on your AP desk approves, corrects or rejects each draft before it becomes a bill. Approved drafts reach AppFolio the way you choose, keyed by your team or brought in with tools your company already has, and then follow your Bill Approval Flows as they do now. Pay Bills stays in your team's hands the whole month.