For a Turkish agency collecting EUR or USD from abroad, the real risk is not the payment but the invoice. When the payment date and the document date differ, it becomes unclear which rate applies, and the accountant ends up checking every document by hand.
Our rule is simple: even when a payment succeeds, the system does not issue an invoice. The record moves to "awaiting manager approval". The moment an authorised person approves it, that day's central bank buying rate is fetched and written permanently to the invoice. If the rate service is unreachable, no invoice is created; nothing is ever issued on an estimated rate.
The flow is visible to the client too: the payment screen notes that invoicing is subject to manager approval, and the invoice appears in the portal and by email once ready. Transparency is the cheapest route to trust.
We never issue a document on an estimated rate. If the rate service is silent, the invoice waits.
01What we store on an invoice record
Each record keeps the transaction currency and amount, the applied rate, the source of that rate and the timestamp it was fetched, the approving user, and the TRY equivalent — all in separate fields. They are separate because the answer to "where did this number come from" must be readable in a single row later.
Once written, the rate field is immutable. If a correction is needed, a new document is issued and the old one stays in the archive with its cancellation record. In accounting, there is no such thing as overwriting.
02Why the approval queue is a feature, not a delay
At first glance a human approval looks like the opposite of automation. In practice we saw the reverse: the queue cut the number of month-end corrections our accountant makes to nearly zero. One click from a manager prevents a three-person email thread later.
To keep the queue from going stale there is a quiet ageing alarm: if a record has been waiting more than twenty-four hours, the responsible manager gets a reminder. Processes rot in the lists nobody looks at.
Written by
The Paradigma7 team
Product, engineering and operations
We are an Ankara-based team building software for Europe. Nothing here is theory: these are the processes we actually run on client projects.
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