Approving a Purchase Order

All purchase orders that are created are grouped under POs pending approval if the approver is selected in the approver's list field. You need to approve the PO first before you can send the same to the vendor, receive items, and other such actions on the PO items. The PO approval process is initiated with a request for approval sent to the concerned authority and depending on the decision taken by the personnel to approve or reject the PO, the other operations can be performed on the PO. ServiceDesk Plus Cloud provides for multi-stage and multiple approvals for a purchase order.

Multi-stage and multiple approvals:

• An approval stage represents levels or hierarchy of approvals that a purchase order needs to go through. You can add up to five stages for a single purchase order. The fifth stage is the highest level of approval.

• Click Add Stage to add the first stage of approval. Click  to add the subsequent approval stages.

• In each approval stage, you can add multiple technicians or requesters as PO approvers. Users with purchase order approval permission are listed in the drop-down irrespective of the technician's site or PO site.

Approval types - ANY or ALL

You can choose to have either any or all of the approvers to approve a PO.  To do this, simply enable the checkboxes against the two options in the approval tab.

Approval type - ANY

• In this case, it is sufficient if just one approver in each stage approves for the PO to move to the next stage of approval. The PO will be considered approved if one approver from each stage has approved it. The purchase order will be considered as approved even if other approvers in the stage have rejected or kept it pending.
• The All the configured approvers have to approve the Purchase order checkbox is left unchecked.
• In this setting, even if one approver in any stage approves the PO, approval notification is sent to approvers in the next stage.
• In this setting, if in the final stage, a single approver approves the PO, the status of the PO is set to Approved.

Sample case scenario:

Scenario 1: At least one of the approvers have approved the PO

In the screen above, the All the configured approvers have to approve the purchase order checkbox is left unchecked. Even though only Caroline has approved the PO, the PO status is set to ‘Approved’.

Approval Type – ALL

• In this case, all approvers configured in each stage need to approve the PO before that stage is set to approved i.e., a PO needs to be approved by all approvers in one stage before approvals in the next stage can be sought. If there is only one stage of approval, the status of the PO is changed to approved once all approvals in the single stage are received.
• The All the configured approvers have to approve the Purchase order checkbox HAS to be checked.
• In this setting, even if one approver in any stage rejects the PO, approval notification is not sent to approvers in the next stage.
• In this setting, if in any stage, an approver rejects the PO the status of the PO is set to ‘rejected’.

Sample case scenario: 

Scenario 1: All approvers have approved the PO

In the screen above, the All the configured approvers have to approve the Purchase order checkbox is checked. All the three approvers Austin, Caroline and John have approved the PO. So the status of the PO is set to ‘Approved’.

Scenario 2: At least one approver has rejected the PO

In the screen above, the All the configured approvers have to approve the purchase order checkbox is checked. While Caroline has approved the PO, Austin has rejected it. So the approval stage status shows rejected and the approval status of the PO is set to rejected. 
 

Note: When an approver has rejected a PO, you can resend the request for approval by clicking on the yellow envelope on the left-hand side of the approver’s name.

Approval mechanism in multiple stages

Let us see some scenarios with more than a single stage of approval. This is applicable to both the ANY and ALL mechanisms of approvals.

Scenario

Scenario 1: There are 2 stages of approval; all approvers in the 1st stage have approved

In this case, Austin in Stage 1 has approved the PO, so the status of Stage 1 is set to approved.  The request for approval is automatically sent to Caroline in Stage 2 and is pending her approval. The status of the PO is pending approval.

Scenario 2: There are 2 Stages of approval; the only approver in Stage1 has rejected the PO

In this case, Austin in Stage 1 has rejected the PO, so the Status of Stage 1 is set to denied.  The request for approval is NOT sent to Caroline in Stage 2 and the Stage 2 status shows to be sent. The status of the PO is ‘rejected. 

Note: When an approver has rejected a PO, you can resend the request for approval by clicking on the yellow envelope on the left-hand side of the approver’s name.

Scenario 3: There are 5 Stages of approval; approval from Stage 1 is Pending

In this case, Adamina in Stage 1 has not yet approved the PO, so the status of the next stage (Stage 2) is set to ‘to be sent’ and the status of the PO is pending approval.

Approval notifications:

• You can choose to send the approval notification automatically for a purchase order by checking the Send approval notification automatically for purchase orders box. As the PO is approved at each stage, approval notifications are automatically sent out to approvers in the succeeding stage.
• When the Send Approval notification automatically for Purchase order is left unchecked, by default, the notification mail is sent automatically to approvers in Stage 1. For all remaining stages, the technician has to manually send the approval notification each time.
• You will be able to configure reply templates for the Purchase order notification emails.
• The resend button (to manually send approval notifications) is enabled at each Stage only when it is active i.e after the approval status of the previous stage is set to approved or rejected. 

Configuring the PO approval notification templates:

You can configure the email templates for the below:

1. Notify approvers for a PO approval
2. Notify the approval sender for PO approval action

Below are the steps to configure the template

• Click on the Setup icon on the top left of the screen.
• Under Automation section, click on Notification Rules. Then click on the Asset tab. 
• Under 'Email templates for’, click on ‘Customize Template’ and customize the email templates for Notifying for Purchase order approval and notifying approval sender for Purchase order approval action.