We have set up a simplified (compared to our old eRequisitions system) purchase order process. As part of the set up for our first user department, we have an approval workflow in place; however we know it won't scale, and wondering what alternatives are available to us.
The company uses Project IDs as cost centers - and we have circa 480 of these. We use account numbers for spend categories. We maintain a "System of Delegation" spreadsheet that lists the people on each cost center permitted to approve and to what financial amount on that cost centre only. Example for cost centre T10276-5 is:
Joe Manager: $10,000
Fred Smith: $50,000
Mary Wells: $100,000
Alice COO: $500,000
Board Approval: $5,000,000
So if a PO is placed for $12,000 on that cost center, the approval request goes straight to Fred Smith. Two other nuances; if the activity is software consultancy and value > $10,000, it must first get routed and approved by the CFO. The other is that if the PO value is over $50,000, then approval is sought from the Purchasing Department first before going onto the the usual signatory.
At the moment, the workflow relies on us drawing out the whole reporting hierachy for each of the 480 cost centers, one by one. We'd like to do what we could previously do with Unit4 and Oracle FInancials, where we could just use our spreadsheet lookup by cost center and value. The Workflow functionality in D365 FInance doesn't appear to be able to do this for us - but which we need to do as we release PO ordering to the rest of the business (all 900+ users).
Is there any way of us doing this and keeping it simple?
Ian W.
