Hello everyone,
My accounting department would like to create an approval process for accounting when registering a new supplier.
When registering new suppliers in Epicor, is it possible to add an approval process?
I know that there is an approval check in supplier entry. However, that check is done by the person registering.
Thanks in advance!
I am going to say that I have never looked 100% closely a the approved supplier checkbox and it’s behaviour apart from the fact that is it enabled by default when you create a new supplier and it is used when using supplier price lists.
My suggestion is take a deeper look how the checkbox functions and if it allows you to raise a PO for that supplier if it is not enabled.
If you use supplier price lists it goes a bit deeper (suggest checking out the help for the workflow).
If you are not using supplier price lists and the behaviour of not checking the box prevents PO entry then you would be able to create a preprocessing directive on the getnew for the vendor/supplier to set the checkbox to false, with some appropriate warning, if you want to extend that to an approval process then you could send an email to an appropriate group email to inform them of a new supplier, and so on…
Before leaping into customisation, please, review the documentation and test it out, the built in functionality may already be enough and slight process change might be all you need.
I hope that helps.
Hi
We often deploy a Supplier Approval workflow using BPMs, BAQs, Functions and Security…essentially:
Users can create suppliers, however they are flagged as Approved = No, Hold Payments = Yes, Inactive = Yes
An email is sent to one or more email addresses periodically throughout the day to show them a list of new supplier records that require attention, then email the person who created the record a notification as soon as the supplier has been made live (as such)
Then in conjunction with security we can stop non-finance users (say) from updating the flags on the record
We don’t add Suppliers all the time, so we have a simple BPM in place to limit who can create a new Supplier to only users in the Finance Management group.
In the times I’ve done this for companies, we’ve used tasks and tasksets to set up the series of steps and responsible parties for each step. Looking at their task list, people can see what they need to do, and then the process moves on to the next person.
If there are parts of the process that need to be restricted to only certain people, like supplier payment info/address, fairly simple BPMs can be set up to restrict to security groups.
Thank you for your replies. The accounting team’s need is for them to review and approve on a screen other than the user’s Supplier Entry, such as electronic Authority applications. I thought it would be unreasonable to expect that level of UI and functionality from Epicor.
@pilio.lee Why not a simple updatable dashboard that would show suppliers?
Set up when a new supplier is created it is not approved
Have the financial group review and update the suppliers.
Thank you for your comment. Are you saying that you should only allow users to register in supplier entry but not approve them, and create an updatable dashboard that only the financial group can use?
I think it’s a good idea. But, when I created an updateable BAQ in the past, I felt that the system was unstable due to mass updates. So I try not to create updatable features unless it’s a serious issue.
This is not a critical issue. If it becomes a critical issue later, we will consider it then. Thank you again.
How many suppliers get created and approved and what’s the SLA for finance to to approve?
An uptabled baq on one field should not be make the system unstable.
I think that @LarsonSolutions solution makes a lot of sense, fairly simple to implement and maintain.