Expenditure reviewers in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations

For a while I have been baffled by how workflows were intended to work in the Accounts payable and Procurement and sourcing modules in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations (D365FO).

A while back I wrote an article on the invoicing workflow and this article is a belated follow-up on that article.

Use case A: Purchase requisition approval

In this use case, all I am trying to achieve is this: a user raises a purchase requisition and submits it for approval. First, the purchase requisition must go to the person’s immediate manager. Secondly, the purchase requisition must go the head-of-department for final approval. This is a pretty common scenario and is relatively easily dealt with, if the line organisation structure follows the financial structure. In that case, the workflow can use the Hierarchy assignment type.

Use case B: Purchase order approval

With purchase order approval, things may get a little bit trickier. The user raising the purchase order may be a purchaser and does not need approval from his or her manager. This approval is implicit in his or her role. The purchaser needs approval from the person, who “owns” the budget. How can we deal with this?

This is where Expenditure reviewers come in…

Expenditure reviewers for purchase requisitions and purchase orders can be set up in the Procurement and sourcing module under Setup / Policies.

What is an Expenditure reviewer, you may ask (I certainly did the first time, I came across them).

Expenditure reviewers are not a well-documented concept in D365FO, but as far as I can tell, they work like this:

1. You can define as many Expenditure reviewers as you like.
2. They are not hierarchical.
3. They are specific to each legal entity.
4. An Expenditure reviewer record is associated with either project distribution or organisation distribution.
5. Project distribution allows a workflow to distribute a workflow item to a project manager, project controller or project sales manager.
6. Organisation distribution allows a workflow to distribute a workflow item to the “owner” of a chosen financial dimension.

In the following example, I have set up an Expenditure review record called “Department”.

The record is set up for organisational distribution and I have chosen Department as the financial dimension used for distribution.

On department “025 IT department”, I have set the owner to “00635” (Adam Thomas).

In the purchase order approval workflow, I set the Assignment type to be Participant.

On the Role based tab I set the Type of participant to be Expenditure participants and select the “Department” expenditure reviewer we set up earlier.

Now the workflow is using the Department expenditure reviewer to assign the approval workflow item to the owner of the department we select on the purchase order.

When we raise a new purchase order, we make sure to set the Department financial dimension value to 025 as shown below.

The purchase order is subsequently submitted for approval. As the workflow history now shows, the approval workflow item is assigned to “Adam Thomas”, the “owner” of department 025. Bob’s your uncle!

Use case C: Invoice approval

The concept of Expenditure reviewer is very strong in relation to invoice approval. Often, the invoice is submitted for approval by an accounts payable clerk so a traditional organisational hierarchy does not make sense. Instead, the approver can be based on a Expenditure reviewer. This allows significantly more flexibility in how we assign invoices for approval.

Summary

This was a short introduction to the concept of Expenditure reviewers. Expenditure reviewers can be combined with hierarchical assignment or simple user assignment in a workflow, so please experiment to find a set up that works for your scenario. In future articles, I will share my own findings as I start combining different assignment types in workflows. Stay tuned…