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Purchase Order approval - multiple approvals from 1 group

  • 11 November 2020
  • 8 replies
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We are looking for a solution to only approve a PO if it receive at least 2 approvals from a group. We have not been able to figure this out yet.

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Best answer by Irina 9 February 2021, 13:04

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Hello

Unfortunately the condition you’d like to use is not supported in approval maps. You can create a separate step which will be checking the approval was done by  any of two groups, but not both.

This condition with either of the groups will look like  Approval  Workgroup equals ‘the workgroup 1’ OR Approval  Workgroup equals ‘the workgroup 2’

I’d recommend to consider an alternative logic and  perhaps there are other fields in a purchase order which you can use in the approval conditions.

Hello @Olesia Alpeeva 

I’m not sure we are understanding one another. We have 1 group. We want the condition to be that they must get approvals from any two individuals in that group.

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  1. On a step, select the rule, and then On the Rule Actions tab specify the workgroup.
  2. Then in the  Company Tree screen include individuals to this group.

As a result the approval will be assign to the workgroup and any of the individuals included in the group will be able to approve

 

Hello @Olesia Alpeeva

How would these steps require 2 approvers? That sounds like any 1 approver would mark the PO as approved.

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Hello @robmellentine, sorry for the long reply.

Currently, it is not possible to achieve such a scenario - approval maps don’t have the functionality to group/aggregate approval steps by a number of approvers or any other approval properties. You could explore customization possibilities or submit this as an idea to https://community.acumatica.com/ideas

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I have found one workaround that seems to work using stock functionality, but it’s not pretty and it’s going to be a lot of work to maintain when any employee turnover occurs.

We have a scenario where documents need 1 approver from a group if they are less than $10k and 2 approvers from the same group if it’s more than $10k.  I had to create a bunch of new nodes on the company tree to accomplish it.  The pool of approvers has 5 members (A,B,C,D,E).  I created 1 node with all 5 of them and then 5 additional nodes with 4 out of 5 of them. The nodes all have to be at the same level.

 

In my approval map, since all documents need 1 approval, I created a step that went to my AP Payment Approval (All) group.  

Then, for the second step, I had to create a node for each possible approver.  Whoever did the first level approval cannot do the second level approval.  In the sample below, we’ll look at one where Employee “D” approves the first step.  If the document approver is Employee D and the total is greater than $10,000, then it’s going to go to the “AP Payment (Not D)” workgroup and the step will be completed after approval.  (The other 4 rules are similar)
 

Here’s what it looks like on the document.  For Step 1, it went to the “All” group and was approved by employee D.  Then, it went to the “Not D” group and was approved by employee C.
 

At this point, I’ve tested it in a demo scenario, but we still need to do some real world testing on it.

Megan, thank you for sharing this. It will require some maintenance, but it’s exactly what I needed and it worked perfectly in test.

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Also -  another note based on some additional testing, is that none of the workgroups can have an owner.

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