If your district allows employees to submit purchase order (PO) requests, then the request needs to go through an approval process before it can be officially issued, shipments can be tracked, and it can be linked to an invoice.
If you are a member of the approval process, you will be required to assess each PO request and decide whether to approve, reject, or return the PO to draft so the employee can make changes. After being approved by everyone in the process, the PO will
Standard Approval Process
Bypassing the Approval Process
Standard Approval Process
The standard approval process starts when an employee submits a PO through the Employee Portal. The PO then gets sent to the first member of the PO approval process, who should proceed with the following steps.
To review a PO:
- Go to the Employee Self-Service Portal or Financials Main, where you will see a list of Pending Approvals Waiting For You
- Approve/Reject
- Choose one of three options
- Approve if the PO looks correct and the district should pay for the requested order.
- Return to Draft if the PO may be approved in the future but the requester needs to make some changes (e.g. they haven’t attached a needed file, or they are requesting 10 items when you will only approve 5).
- Reject if the PO should not be approved.
If the PO is approved, it will be passed on to the next person on the approval process list until the final approver has made a decision. If it is approved by everyone, a Financials User can move on to issuing the PO.
Bypassing the Approval Process
Sometimes, it may not be necessary to go through the entire approval process that was set up because the top-level approver has already agreed to the PO. Instead of waiting for every person in the approval process to accept the PO, a Financials User with Modify Purchase Orders permissions can bypass the approval process by directly editing the status of the PO.
To bypass the approval process:
- Go to Financials Main > Accounts Payable > Purchase Orders
- Edit the PO
- Change the Status
- Make other data changes if necessary
- Save