Approval Route Creation
You must set up approval routes to specify the persons who are responsible for approving an order. After you assign an approval route to an order, the system does not process the order until the persons on the route approve the order, which ensures that all purchases are authorized by the appropriate personnel.
The persons responsible for approving each order might differ based on the department in which you work, the items that you want to purchase, and so on. You can create multiple approval routes, each of which contains a different group of persons.
Depending on the cost of the items or services that you want to purchase, you might need to obtain approval for an order from several persons. For each person that you enter on an approval route, you must specify the amount that an order must exceed to require that person's approval. You must enter persons in ascending order by amount. For example, here are the approvers for approval route A:
Approval Amount |
Responsible Person |
|---|---|
100 |
Dwight Akin |
1,000 |
Ray Allen |
5,000 |
Dominique Abbot |
Using approval route A, if the order total is:
Less than 100.00, the system automatically approves it.
100.00 or more, Dwight Akin must approve it.
1,000.00 or more, Dwight Akin and Ray Allen must approve it.
5,000.00 or more, all three persons must approve it.
If you change the approval amount for a person, pending approvals are not affected.
You can bypass persons on an approval route. For example, using the same example, Dominique Abbot can approve any order before Dwight Akin or Ray Allen and bypass them in the approval process.
You might want to assign the same approval amount to multiple persons so that if one is not available to approve an order, another is available who can. Only the first person on the approval route with the lowest address book number will receive a message that an order is awaiting approval, although any of the persons can approve the order. The same person cannot appear more than once in a table.
You might want to assign a budget approver to an approval route to release orders on hold due to exceeding the budget. The budget approver must approve the order and release the hold before other persons on the approval route can approve the order. If an order is not on budget hold, it skips the budget approver and goes to the first person on the route.
You must assign a unique name to each approval route that you enter. You must also specify the type of order to which the route applies (for example, purchase orders, subcontract orders, requisitions, blanket orders, and so on).
The system uses electronic mail messages to notify each applicable person and an approval route that an order is awaiting approval. Persons are notified in the order that their name appears on the route.
If you delete or add a person on an approval route, the system redirects pending approvals to the appropriate person but does not resend electronic mail messages.