Purchase Order Approval Flow – Sertica Support

Overview

It is possible to set up an approval workflow for purchase orders in SERTICA, ensuring that a purchase order must be approved before it can be submitted. Approval requirements can also depend on the value of the purchase order, allowing you to define which users are authorized to approve up to specific amounts.

Procurement Flow

Setting Up Approvals

Approval settings are configured through the Company menu, either by editing an existing company or creating a new one.

A company record contains a variety of details, many of which will be familiar from the address book in SERTICA.

In addition to the company details, you can add approvers on one of the company tabs.

Adding Approvers

When adding entries to the Approvers tab, you can choose between individual users or roles. Using roles eliminates the need to maintain approval permissions for specific users and instead allows approval responsibilities to be managed at a role level.

After adding users or roles, you can configure approval limits.

Approval Amount Limit	Personal Approval Limit
Approval limit for purchase orders when approving a purchase order created by another user.	Approval limit for purchase orders that you have created yourself.

In addition, it is possible to define approval limits for individual accounts, allowing exceptions and special cases to be handled separately.

Purchasing Settings

Another tab within the company settings contains the various purchasing-related configuration options.

If you want to use an approval workflow, it is important to enable "Approval Required".

You can also require purchase orders to have a price before approval by enabling "Purchase Orders Must Be Priced". This may be necessary to ensure that approvers can make decisions based on the applicable approval limits.

The final checkbox, "Purchaser and Approver Must Be Different", ensures that more than one person reviews the purchase order before it is submitted to the supplier.

If you created the purchase order yourself, you can still approve it (provided your personal approval limit allows it). However, if this setting is enabled, you will not be able to submit the purchase order afterwards. A different purchaser must be involved before the order can be sent to the supplier.

Task List

To easily keep track of purchase orders that require action, you can create a task list for purchase orders under the Tasks menu.

You can then choose a name for the task list and select which tasks should be included. Make sure to select all tasks related to Purchasing.

Note: Task lists cannot be shared with other users. Each user must create their own task list individually.

Once created, the task list allows you to monitor the different stages of your purchase orders.

Using the Approval Workflow

If an approval workflow has been configured, purchase orders must be approved before they can be submitted. The setup of approval workflows is described in the previous section, Approve Purchase Orders.

For a purchase order you have created, you can send it to an approver. Note that the status of the purchase order is displayed at the top of the screen, allowing you to see, for example, whether it has been ordered yet.

If you approve it yourself, the order is ready to be submitted, unless the Purchaser and Approver Must Be Different setting is enabled.

After forwarding the purchase order, the Approval section of the purchase order will show the user to whom it was forwarded.

You must then wait for that user to approve the purchase order before it can be submitted.