KSeF delivers the invoices, but a company still has to set up its document workflow

No. KSeF, Poland's National e-Invoicing System, delivers an invoice to one place, but it does not know who in the company should see it, approve it and by when. Since the duty came in we often hear that, with every invoice now landing in one place, the document workflow will sort itself out. It won't. It is a separate layer and someone has to set it up.

What KSeF puts in order, and what it leaves alone

KSeF changes the way an invoice travels from your supplier to you. Instead of e-mail, post and paper there is one place, one format and a confirmed date of issue. An invoice won't vanish on the way into the mailbox of someone who happens to be on holiday.

That is where KSeF stops. An invoice being in the system does not mean anyone has checked it, approved it or passed it on to accounting. The system will not name a person responsible, will not run an approval, and will not tell you what stage a document has reached.

Take a construction company. An invoice for concrete arrives on Monday morning. As far as KSeF is concerned it has been delivered and the matter is closed. For the company it is only starting: has the site manager seen it, does the amount match the order, and who clicks "approve" when the manager is at another site?

What stays outside KSeF and still needs a route

KSeF covers domestic invoices. Invoices from foreign suppliers, contracts, addenda, orders, handover reports and letters all stay outside it. On our page about KSeF in SaldeoSMART we add insurance policies, debit notes and receipts from business trips to that list. Each of these has to be archived, and some have to go through somebody's approval just like an invoice.

A report on completed works needs the signature of the person who was on site, exactly like the invoice for those works. The only difference is that one arrives from KSeF and the other as a scan or an e-mail.

One route instead of two

Two separate routes, one for KSeF and one for everything else, mean two places to watch. So at implementation we set up a single one: an invoice from KSeF, a scan taken with a phone and a contract from a supplier all enter the same document workflow, each with an owner and a deadline. SaldeoSMART (the document and accounting platform we implement) fetches KSeF invoices automatically once it is set up, so nobody checks by hand whether something new has arrived.

The person who knows the matter sees the amount and the supplier, not the chart of accounts. After approval the document goes to accounting with its coding, and the record of who touched it and when stays attached. Stand-ins cover absences, so approval doesn't stall because somebody is away.

The software will show that an invoice has been waiting eleven days. Who approves, and how fast, is still the company's call, and that is usually where something has to change. So we build the route together with you and not from a ready-made template.

At our clients we start with two approvers and add a third only once it is clear where invoices really get stuck. In a one-person company with nobody to ask for sign-off on a cost, we don't set up a workflow at all: fetching from KSeF and coding the invoices is enough there.

Starting point: the vendor's blog post "Czy KSeF może zastąpić obieg dokumentów w firmie?" (August 2026, in Polish). The assessment and the implementation experience are ours.