Purchase Order Approvals

Hi ​@asingh ,

You’re already on the right track, you will want to play with adding those fields as “Is Empty” to the Conditions of your tree.

Now, a word of caution, you may want to consider the scenario where those fields do indeed get populated before clearing the approval process.  That could be a stickier situation to work through, as Approvals get cleared out every time you put the PO On Hold, and don’t keep any kind of record (or at least, the last time I messed with it that was the behavior).

To work through that scenario, there are a couple of creative plays like creating an Activity (which does stick around) upon approval, or creating an “Order Approved” tickbox that automatically gets ticked via Workflow when transitioning out of Pending Approval/ into Open status.  Then you can leverage that tickbox as well in your Approval Conditions.

Just some ideas, hope it helps some!

Hi ​@craig2 thanks for the reply. But I’m not sure the logic they’re asking for is possible. On my initial approval map, I had the approval condition as ‘Order Nbr’ is ‘Not Empty’ so that every PO required an approval once it has been saved.

However based on the custom date fileds that have to be entered, it will need to go on hold and be removed from hold at different times, I did consider your advice about the fields but that is another sticky stiuation; those custom fields are populated in a GI called ‘Expediting Report’ that is used by sales managers and supervisors to track shipments, so if those fields are incorrectly populated it will provide incorrect information to the GI and its users.

In essence, they would like to have an initial approval, be able to put the PO on hold multiple times to populate the custom date fields without having to reapprove the PO with the exception being if a vendor price needs to be changed on the PO line only then would a reapproval be needed.

Not sure how the logic in those steps are possible.

Thanks

Amit