PO Approval Price Changes

Kinetic ERP
1

Our current PO Approval process is working great with one exception and I wanted to see if anyone else has a solution for it.

Currently, the buyers have a PO limit (X) that once a PO is confirmed, if the order total exceeds that amount, it requires approval from the department manager. I have a BPM to send out an email once this occurs, it lists the PO, Vendor, Amount etc..

This all works well but the issue occurs when the PO gets approved, then the buyer has to go back and change the amount on freight or tax lets say by a few dollars.

This triggers the entire PO Approval process again, and a new email. I ended up re-writing the BPM so that it tracks changes on the order amount and lists it in the body. Example, if the PO was $1,000 and the additional amount added is $200 it’s all listed so the approver doesn’t think we have another PO from the same vendor at $1,200 in addition to the original PO at $1,000.

I’ve been asked to see what are options are for approving that additional amount without having to go through the entire PO Approval process unless the changed amount exceeds the buyers credit limit.

To my know knowledge, there isn’t any other way to allow the buyer to approve their own PO in this scenario for the additional $200 if their credit limit is $1,000 because the order total is more than that.

Does everyone else here just live with starting the approval process all over again for minor changes to the order amount?

Thanks,

2

When a PO is approved through the approval process, Kinetic saves an ApprovedAmount to the POHeader table. That amount becomes the threshold for whether a change requires approval again: if the PO is changed but the price stays the same or goes down, the buyer is allowed to approve their change without going through the approval process again, even if the total is more than their normal buying limit.

We typically are okay with this - if a buyer is increasing the total price of the PO, the approver wants to know.

However, since this is a value that’s saved to the PO, you may be able to use a BPM with a data form or custom field on the approval screen to prompt the approver for a new approval threshold. Say, the PO is approved for $1000 but the approver knows the freight or tax might bring it up to $1200. Let the approver enter that amount in your prompt and then insert that value into POHeader.ApprovedAmount.

I haven’t tried this in a BPM, so you may have to play around with where exactly the trigger needs to be so that the correct value is inserted.

3

Interesting, that does point me in the right direction. Thanks @tsmith !