Timing
- Bill activity is detected through QuickBooks Online webhooks with a daily polling backstop. That is not an instant or guaranteed real-time SLA.
- New QBO bills are evaluated for amount thresholds, possible duplicates, and new-vendor high-value rules when the create event is processed.
- Bill edits are monitored separately from create-time duplicate and threshold rules. Amount-threshold exceptions do not re-fire solely because an existing bill was later edited to a higher amount.
Possible duplicates
- New QBO bills are evaluated for possible duplicates.
- Matching can include exact document numbers, punctuation-normalized numbers, limited OCR-style typos (string distance), near amounts/dates under rule limits, and cross-vendor name normalization where configured.
- Duplicate findings are review prompts, not determinations of fraud, error, or intent.
- A vendor Ignore duplicate matching override applies only to future new bills from that vendor in that connected company. Existing Possible duplicate exceptions are not removed automatically.
Edits and reviews
- Material field changes (vendor, amounts, transaction date, category/class/tax/item line fields, added/removed lines) can surface in change history and, when a bill was previously marked reviewed, as Changed After Review exceptions.
- Memo-only / description-only line text is not treated as a financial line-item change for the material Changed After Review field set.
- We retain before-and-after snapshots for investigation. We do not call those snapshots “immutable.”
Closed-period edits
- Closed-period signals require a QBO closing date that has been synced into BillGuardRail for that company.
- Coverage is bill-focused AP monitoring—not every transaction type in the QBO Exceptions to Closing Date report.
- BillGuardRail does not enforce or replace QBO closing-date passwords or warnings.
Amount thresholds and multi-company
- Organization default amount threshold (ships at $1,000) can be overridden per-vendor in Settings → Alerts → Vendor overrides.
- Standard plans monitor one connected QBO company; Bookkeeper plans support up to 10 companies in one workspace queue without merging ledgers.
Read-only posture
BillGuardRail does not approve, block, pay, or edit bills in QBO. Alerts and exceptions exist so a human can investigate in QuickBooks Online.
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