Understanding Approvals
What Does This Page Cover?
Learn about approvals in the procurement process, why, they are required, and the teams involved in timely approvals and rejections of PRs and POs.
Overview
An approval refers to a formal process of granting consent, authorization, or permission for something to proceed or be implemented. This is a type of business process that includes steps or stages to approve or reject a work form, from different levels of an organization. Approval processes are mainly used to ensure that important decisions are made by the right people at the right time, which involves careful consideration, evaluation, and often communication amongst relevant individuals or authorities.
Benefits of Approval process:
Increased visibility, trust, and control
Better decision-making and budget controlling
Save time cost by automating repetitive approval processes
Regulated Compliance
Approvals in Procurement by Zoho Creator
Within our procurement solution, the approval process is effectively used to obtain approvals for procurement or purchase of intended goods. This would go through different levels of appropriate approval from the appropriate stake holders. In this instance, these requests must be approved by a designated authority which could be a manager or the Finance team, depending upon the requirement.
Manager Approval
When a procurement request is raised and in progress, it goes through the manager's approval as part of the process, so it can either be approved or rejected depending upon the requirement.
When the manager receives a request for approval, it helps them assess whether the proposed procurement aligns with the organization's strategic objectives. If it doesn't align, they have the right to reject the request. Managers also review procurement requests to ensure they fall within the approved budget for the department or project. Timely manager approval is vital to prevent delays in the procurement process, as delays can impact project schedules or disrupt the supply chain.
Finance Approval
One of the primary purposes of finance approval is to ensure that the procurement request falls within the approved budget for the department, project, or organization. If it doesn't, the team has the option to reject the request.
Use Cases
Please see below few examples of where, when, and why different approvals are required within the procurement process.
Where: At the department level.
When: A department identifies a need for goods or services to be procured.
Why: To confirm that the request is legitimate and aligns with departmental goals and budget constraints.
Where: At the department or project level.
When: After the procurement request is submitted.
Why: To ensure that the purchase is in line with the department's objectives and that it doesn't exceed budgetary limits.
When: After managerial approval, before purchase order creation.
Why: To verify that funds are available, the procurement aligns with budgetary constraints, and the financial aspects are sound.
Points to Note
At the moment, there is only an option to configure basic level approvals. The number of approval levels can be increased to up to three, which will be applicable for all the projects.
However, we are actively working on a conditional level approval option that will allow the users to increase the number of approval levels more than three and to configure project specific approvals.
Bulk approval option is not present at the moment and should become available at a later point.