APBuddy vs ApprovalMax for multi-entity Xero groups
By Paddy Carroll · · updated
ApprovalMax is the most established approval layer for Xero, and for a single company or a handful of entities it is usually the right choice. The difference that matters for a group is the pricing model: ApprovalMax charges per Xero organisation from the very first one; APBuddy’s Group plan carries fifteen inside its base price. At one entity ApprovalMax is cheaper. Somewhere around five, that reverses, and it keeps going.
This page is about where that line sits and what you give up on either side of it. If you are comparing the two, you probably already know both do multi-entity approvals — so the feature-tick comparison is not the interesting part.
How much does ApprovalMax cost for multiple Xero organisations?
The price is per organisation per month, so it multiplies by your entity count. ApprovalMax’s pricing page lists Premium at €167 per organisation per month at the Medium size (up to 300 documents per month, unlimited approvers), excluding tax, with overage rates beyond the document limit.
Three tiers — Standard, Advanced, Premium — set the features, and three sizes — Small, Medium, Large — set the usage allowance. ApprovalMax states that all features are the same across Small, Medium and Large, so size is a volume bucket and tier is a capability bucket.
For a group, the arithmetic is the whole story. At Premium/Medium:
| Xero organisations | ApprovalMax per month |
|---|---|
| 3 | €501 |
| 5 | €835 |
| 10 | €1,670 |
| 20 | €3,340 |
APBuddy’s Group plan is $799 per month including fifteen entities, then $39 per additional entity per month, up to forty. Twenty entities is $799 + 5 × $39 = $994 a month. The currencies differ, so check the rate on the day rather than trusting a conversion here — but the shape is not sensitive to the exchange rate: one price grows with every organisation from the first, the other has most of the group already inside the base plan.
At what point does per-organisation pricing stop making sense?
Around five entities, on the Premium tier — and that number is the honest answer rather than a flattering one. Below it, ApprovalMax on a lower tier is genuinely cheaper than anything charging a flat multi-entity rate, and a two-entity group should probably buy ApprovalMax.
The reason the crossover is worth naming is that entity count is not a proxy for size. A group with twenty entities and modest volume is a very ordinary structure in construction, property and professional services — separate companies for liability, ownership or a joint venture, most of them quiet. Per-organisation pricing charges that group as though each dormant entity were a business, because the unit of billing is the ledger rather than the work.
If your entities are all busy, the multiplier is defensible: you are getting twenty organisations’ worth of approvals. If half of them process a handful of bills a month, you are paying a per-company price for a per-group problem.
What does ApprovalMax do that APBuddy does not?
A fair amount, and pretending otherwise would waste your time. From ApprovalMax’s own feature comparison:
- Accounts receivable workflows — creating, approving and emailing sales invoices, approving AR credit notes, AR ageing reports, and sales quotes on Advanced and above. APBuddy is accounts payable and procurement only.
- Budget checking before approval, comparing bills and purchase orders against budgets synced from Xero (Advanced and above).
- Batch payment preparation and verification, grouping bills into a Xero batch payment for approval (Premium).
- Accrual reports generated, approved and synced back to Xero (Advanced and above).
- Alerts for skipped approvals — detecting bills approved directly in Xero, outside the workflow, which is a genuine fraud control and is on every tier.
- ISO 27001:2022 certification, SSO, passkeys and a public API on Premium. APBuddy is a younger product and you should weigh that accordingly.
Multi-step approvals and multi-entity approvals are on every ApprovalMax tier, including Standard. If those two are all you need, the cheapest tier does the job, and that is the comparison you should be running rather than this one.
What does APBuddy do differently?
It treats the document pipeline and the approval as one system rather than an approval layer on top of Xero. A bill arrives by email or upload, gets extracted, matched against the right entity and supplier, routed for approval, and posted to the correct Xero organisation — one path, one audit trail, one place to look when something stalls.
The practical differences for a group:
- Supplier records hold the fields Xero refuses. Insurance expiry, ABN verification, bank-detail verification status, entity codes. Because they live on the record rather than a spreadsheet, they can gate an approval — a supplier with lapsed insurance can be blocked rather than flagged. We wrote about that gap in Xero approval workflows and custom fields.
- Cross-entity views are native, because the data model is a group with entities rather than one connection per ledger — including subscription detection across entities, which shows the same tool being paid for twice in a way no single organisation can.
- Procurement workflows beyond bills — purchase requests, subcontractor engagements with margin checks, and supplier onboarding via a public registration form.
- Fifteen entities inside the base plan, and $39 a month for each one after, which is the pricing consequence of that same data model — the group is the unit, and an extra company is an increment rather than another full licence.
Which should you actually choose?
Choose ApprovalMax if you have a small number of entities, want AR approvals as well as AP, need budget checking or batch payment verification, or if procurement certification and a long compliance track record are decision criteria. Those are real reasons and none of them are close calls.
Choose APBuddy if you are running enough Xero entities that per-organisation pricing has become the main line item, if your bills arrive as documents that someone currently keys in, if you need supplier data Xero cannot store, or if your approvals are part of a wider procurement process rather than a step on a bill.
The honest test is which unit your problem is measured in. If it is documents and policy in one company, an approval layer is the right shape. If it is a group — entities, intercompany, suppliers shared across companies, and a per-organisation bill that grows every time the structure does — the layer should understand the group.
If that is your situation, tell us about your setup and we will show you the entity-level view before you commit to anything.