Purchase Order Approvals

Cost based approval thresholds and team/role based approval workflows

Using ION's roles and teams, set up and automate approvals at different dollar amount thresholds. When the approval workflow is set up, notifications will be sent to each person in the sequence. Once all the approvals are completed the purchase order will automatically be moved to an approved state. If a purchase order changes by a set threshold amount during or after the approval process, reapproval will be triggered, otherwise the original approvals stand.

Organization Purchase Order Approval Policy Setup:

Here is an example of a PO approval policy. An admin can set this up in your organization settings under the purchase order tab. The approvals notifications flow from level 1 to level 4 but anyone can approve at any time.

Level 1: For purchase orders the Manager for the team selected on the PO is required to approve the PO

Level 2: For purchase orders over $10,000 the Director of the team selected on the PO is required

Level 3: For all purchase orders someone on the Finance/Accounting team needs to approve the purchase order

Level 4: For POs over $100,000 the CEO is required to approve the PO

A note on teams and roles:

ION has customizable teams and roles that enable you to model your actual organization structure. For example, if you have an "Electrical Design" team with a team lead and a director you can create a role for team lead and director, assign those roles to users within your organization, and then assign those individuals to that team. In reality, you might have multiple team leads on one team or a team lead can be on multiple teams. This scenario can be modeled as well. If someone goes on vacation an admin can easily add a replacement team member or change someone's role to meet the approval.

Initiating the workflow on the PO

After setting up the approval policy in org settings you should be able to start approval workflows on PO's.

1. Buyer: To initiate the approval workflow, go to the purchase order and press 'Approval Setup'

2. Buyer: Once the modal pops up, select the team that this purchase order corresponds with. In this case, the facilities team is required for approval. If submitted at this point, all qualified users for that team and role combination will be notified.

   
3. Buyer: Additionally the buyer can specify the particular person whom he/she would like approval from at each step of the process by using the "All Qualifiers" dropdown.

4. Buyer: To initialize the workflow press "Submit For Review." The status of the PO should now be "In Review" and a new button should appear at the top of the PO called "Approval Review"

5. Approvers: Navigate to the PO or press on the notification you received in your ION notification center. Press "Approval Review" to make your approval. NOTE: By default, all admins can approve any step of the approval sequence

   
6. In the picture above, there are three approval stages. The first stage is requesting approval from the Manager of the facilities team, which I happen to be. In normal circumstances I would not have access to the second two but because I am an admin I can approve every stage. You see the 20 qualified users because we have 20 admins in our environment. At this point I can approve all levels even though the first level is not approved. The purchase order will not move to Approved until all levels have been approved.

   

When the approval workflow is set on the PO, and the cost thresholds are met then the team lead will be notified first. Once he/she approves the order then the director for that team will be notified. If there are two directors or two team leads then both will be notified but only one will be required to approve.

Additional Details:

Changing the organization settings while there are active approvals on purchase orders will not affect the existing approval workflows. There will be a reset approvals button to allow you to make these changes live on existing approvals.