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Purchase Quote or PO work flows Business Central

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Posted on by Cmugford

Our company is considering Business Central, one of the key things we are interested in is the "approval" workflows. I have been looking into it more. I'm wondering if the approvals are not robust enough for our current dynamic logic or if I'm just not understanding the set up.

We would like to route a PO based on a PO type - currently in our existing procurement system, we have PO types, such a Capital, direct purchase, raw materials, parts, among other PO types. depending on the PO type that user chooses it will take the routing we set, some routes based on PO type could route to a report to structure based on GOA, or route to the supply chain chain of approvers, or through finance chain of approvers. I'm noticing there is no options for a quote or PO to determine a PO type in order to mimic this. Am I wrong? I'm wondering before I spend money on a consultant to assist, if anyone has a sample set up that might be explained to me that might be close to what I've described out of box?

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Guy McKenzie 1,330 on at

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RE: Purchase Quote or PO work flows Business Central

Yes, there a few ways to try and route your workflow.

Dimensions as mentioned already. Also, purchaser codes, responsibility centres and possibly buy from and pay to vendor hierarchy can all be used to route approvals.

Note that it helps to make sure using such fields doesn’t clash with any other functionality. I.e. responsibility centres can restrict visibility.

Purchaser codes can be the neatest solution in many cases.
Alfredo_Iorio 1,260 on at

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RE: Purchase Quote or PO work flows Business Central

I agree with both MahGah and YUN.

Workflows are very flexible in BC and you implement logic to route different orders to different approvers depending on fields in both the purchase header and the purchase lines.

Order types are typical of your organization and BC does not support tagging POs with certain attributes.

Yet, I assume your order type is driven by either the vendor or the items that your organization purchases.

In that case, you can use vendor dimensions or item categories. For example, you can set up items as raw material, then the approval workflow can be set up to route the order with raw material items to a line manager in manufacturing while orders with finished goods items can be routed to another line manager.
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YUN ZHU 73,647 Super User 2024 Season 2 on at

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RE: Purchase Quote or PO work flows Business Central

Hi, Ignore your company's custom fields for now. If you use the BC standard Workflow feature, you can send different workflow processes for different conditions.

For example, PO Approval Workflow for Location East

More details:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/across-set-up-workflows

Another option is to use Power Automate, which will make the process more flexible.

Here is a simple example: https://yzhums.com/8295/

Hope this info also helps

Thanks.

ZHU
Cmugford 15 on at

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RE: Purchase Quote or PO work flows Business Central

thank you, you validated what I was thinking.
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MahGah 15,428 on at

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RE: Purchase Quote or PO work flows Business Central

Hi

I am just an end user. Hence, it is a chance that it is a better way to manage this.

1) With small modification

You mentioned about PO Type. I am not aware of any field in BC that can determine the PO type. Hence, you may need very small development to add that field to PO. Then as soon as you add that field into PO you can setup different workflow.

Basically we know that in BC you can define Workflow User Group which should be enough to defines your team of approver https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/across-how-to-set-up-workflow-users

In addition we know you can have multiple workflow for one document such as PO

Then you can filter each workflow based on value of the newly added field and then define each User Group for that flow.

The only challenge is you need to setup as many workflow as your PO-type or your PO-type and $ value.

2) Without modification. I do not recommend this but it is possible.

For item you can use one of item fields to determine the PO Type you just need to make sure that field shows up in PO. field such as Item Category. Then you can filter your workflow based on that field. This way user does not need to select the PO Type. (or you can add field here in item card and let system populate it in PO and then use that for filter)

Same logic can work with G/L account

I hope this give you some idea