Purchase approvals (Procurement required)

SECURITY  Security level with permission to approve and reject inventory items. Refer to Approve/Reject Items.

NAVIGATION   > Inventory > Procurement & Delivery > Purchase Approvals

Permission to approve or reject a charge for purchase is granted via custom settings applied to your Autotask security level. For information on this setting, refer to Approve/Reject Items.

A charge purchase requires approval when all of the following is true:

• The charge must be based on a product that is subject to procurement. Refer to Does not require Procurement.

• The extended cost of a quote item, ticket charge, contract charge, or project charge is equal to or greater than an amount set by your Autotask administrator. The amount that triggers the approval process is specified by a system setting. Refer to Require approval before ordering quoted products whose extended cost is greater than or equal to a specified amount.

• The Status of the charge is Need to Order/Fulfill.

If all three conditions are met, Autotask automatically sets the charge status to Waiting for Approval, and the charge appears on the Purchase Approvals page.

The Purchase Approvals page lists all items with a status of Waiting for Approval. You can use the column filters to search for specific items. The column chooser includes the columns in the following table.

Procurement pages column descriptions

Column	Description
Available	This field refers to stocked items, purchase order items, and product quote items that you keep in inventory. It specifies the number of units of this item currently available in the specified inventory location. Available = (On Hand - Reserved/Picked). If a quote is lost, the reservation is released and the stocked item reverts to a status of Available.
Organization	The organization associated with the sales order, or the ticket, contract, or project charge. Click the hyperlink to open the Organization page.
Date Purchased	The date when the item was purchased. This field will be disabled for contract charges created by a block, retainer, or per ticket purchases. By default, it will display the purchase date of the charges.
Estimated Arrival Date (available on Receiving page only)	You can specify an estimated arrival date on purchase order items. The Estimated Arrival Date field appears on the Purchase Order Item page Memo form. There is also an Estimated Arrival Date window that will open when you submit a purchase order. From this window you can specify an estimated arrival date for any items on the purchase order that do not have a date specified.
Extended Cost (available on Purchase Approval page only)	The unit cost multiplied by the quantity.
Internal Invoice Number	An internal invoice number for the charge used for reference only.
Internal PO Number	An internal purchase order number for a charge. It is for internal reference only and is not carried through to billing.
Manufacturer Product Number	The part number assigned to the product by the manufacturer
Notes	This column shows notes that were added to the contract, project, or ticket charge. These notes can be edited as long as the charge has not been billed.
On Hand	The On Hand field indicates the stocked item count at a specific inventory location. Stocked items are considered On Hand if they are available, picked, or reserved.
P.O. Number (available on Receiving and Delivery & Shipping pages only)	This field appears on entities that are part of the billing workflow, and is applied to labor and charges. If you assign a purchase order (PO) number to a quote (on the Terms tab), and then close the associated opportunity using the Won Opportunity Wizard, any charges created using the Won Opportunity Wizard will inherit the PO number. If you assign a PO number to a contract, the associated billing items inherit the contract's PO number. If you assign a PO number to projects, tickets, or tasks, that PO number will override the associated contract's purchase order number. The PO number appears on invoices. A separate invoice is created for each PO number. If an organization has multiple billing items that are assigned to different PO numbers, Autotask will generate multiple invoices for that organization. Refer to Working with purchase order (PO) numbers.
Posted (available on Purchase Approvals and Purchasing & Fulfillment pages only)	A check mark indicates that the charge has been approved and posted.
Primary Vendor (available on Purchase Approvals and Purchasing & Fulfillment pages only)	The default vendor specified for the product on which the charge is based. Click the hyperlink to open the Organization page.
Product	The product on which the charge is based. Click the hyperlink to open the Charge page.
Product SKU (available on Purchase Approvals and Purchasing & Fulfillment pages only)	The SKU (stock keeping unit) number assigned to the product
Quantity Needed (available on Purchase Approvals and Purchasing & Fulfillment pages only)	The quantity that must be ordered to fulfill the charge
Reserved / Picked	The number of items that have already been picked or reserved. Click the hyperlink to open the Reserved/Picked Details window.
Sales Order	The name of the sales order associated with the charge. Click the hyperlink to open the Sales Order Detail page.
Ship To (not available on Purchase Approvals)	The shipping address specified on the purchase order. If the item is not associated with a purchase order, the shipping address on the sales order is shown.
Ticket / Project / Contract	The name of the associated project or contract, or the number of the associated ticket. Click the hyperlink to open the parent entity.
Vendor (available on Receiving page only)	On the Receiving page, the Vendor column reflects the vendor the order was placed with, not the primary vendor. Click the hyperlink to open the Organization page.
Vendor Invoice Number (available on Receiving page only)	The Vendor Invoice Number is associated with purchase order items when they are received into Autotask as stocked items. The same vendor invoice number is assigned to all purchase order items that are received in the same shipment. If a purchase order item is partially received over multiple shipments, it may have multiple associated vendor invoice numbers. On the purchase order, the Vendor Invoice # field becomes read-only when the first item on the purchase order has been received. It will contain all vendor invoice numbers associated with all purchase order items that are part of the purchase order, separated by commas. This field is required if the Require Vendor Invoice Number on received purchase order items and when manually adding stocked items to inventory system setting is enabled.

NOTE  A single charge item can appear on more than one Procurement page (Purchase Approval, Purchasing & Fulfillment, Receiving, and Delivery & Shipping) at the same time if there are units which have different statuses. For example, an item may have some units with the status of Ready to Deliver/Ship, and some units with the status of On Order.

To approve or reject a purchase, do the following:

1. To open the page, use the path(s) in the Security and navigation section above.
2. Locate the items to approve or reject. Use the column filters to narrow the contents of the list.

3. Click one or more check boxes to select items you want to approve or reject. You can only apply one option at time.

NOTE  To select all items in the list, click the check box in the Heading row .

4. To approve all selected items, click Approve.

The status of all selected items changes to Need to Order/Fulfill. The items are forwarded to the Purchasing & Fulfillment page.

5. To reject all selected items, click Reject.
6. Type the reason for the rejection and then click Reject.

The status of the selected items changes to Pending. Items are cleared from the Purchase Approvals page but do not move to the Purchasing & Fulfillment page.

7. A notification is sent to the members of the purchasing team, the resource that created the item, the primary resource for a ticket charge, the project lead for a project charge, the opportunity owner for a quoted item, and the sales order owner (if different from the opportunity owner).

NOTE  The approval or rejection notification is the only record of who approved or rejected the purchase. Autotask resources with Admin security level permissions can access the notification through the Notification History page for up to 30 days after it was sent ( > Admin > Features & Settings > Application-wide (Shared) Features > Notification History).
The approval/rejection notifications can be turned off via the Inventory System Setting, Enable/Disable Inventory Notifications. When the notification is turned off, there is no record who approved or rejected the item.

When a purchase is rejected, the item status is set to Pending. You can access the item from its parent entity.

1. Correct the reasons for rejection as described in the rejection notification. Then, edit the charge and change the status to Need to Order/Fulfill.

2. Once again, Autotask will change the status to Needs Approval, and the item will return to the Purchase Approvals page. The approver can review the charge again, and approve or reject it.

To export all the items in the list in CSV format, click the Export icon. For multi-page lists, all pages are included.