Purchase contract approvals
The purchase contract approval process is a central part of the Purchase Contracts module. The purpose of contract approvals is to ensure that one person in an organization – the approver – is responsible for periodically checking one or more of the organization's current contracts and making sure that they're up to date, renewed, canceled, or modified – if necessary. You can assign different approvers to different contracts, or have one person approve all contracts – whatever makes the most sense for your organization.
Prior to the release of Continia Document Capture 25.00, this process was known as purchase contract reviews. It has since been overhauled to bring it in line with the approval of purchase invoices. Note that:
- The following Document Capture approval module features are currently not supported: advanced approval, four-eye approval, and approval flows.
- After upgrading to 25.00, the status of existing purchase contracts that have already been reviewed is set to Released, while all others are set to Approval Needed. Therefore, these need to be reviewed.
- If the Document Approval module isn't activated in your environment, the purchase contracts functionality process is limited. Therefore, many of the features described in this article aren't available.
For more information, see Setting up purchase contract approval.
To send a single contract for approval
As an approval administrator, you can send a contract for approval by following these steps:
- Search (
) for and select Purchase Contracts. - In the list of contracts, select the one you want to send for approval.
- On the action bar, click Approve > Send Approval Request.
This sends the contract for approval, and the Status field on the Approvals FastTab changes to Pending Approval.
To send a batch of contracts for approval
As an approval administrator, you can send a batch of contracts for approval by following these steps:
Search (
) for and select Purchase Contracts.On the action bar, click Home > Send Approval Request Batch to open the Send purchase contracts for approval page.
On the Filter: Purchase Contract Header FastTab, the Next Approval Date filter is added and prefilled with the date range ..[today], which means that all contracts that haven't yet been reviewed and whose Next Approval Date has been exceeded are sent for review in one batch. If necessary, change the prefilled date range.
Optional: To add another filter, click + Filter.
Optional: To run the batch report at a later time, click Schedule..., and then select a start date/time and an expiration date/time. You can also enter a date formula, which autofills Earliest Start Date/Time.
Note
If you select Next Run Date Formula, you must enter a formula in the form of a whole number followed by D (days), WD (weekdays), W (weeks), M (months), Q (quarters), or Y (years) – for example, 2W (two weeks). For more advanced formulas, you can also use the mathematical symbols + and –, or you can enter the letter C (current) as a prefix to any of the previously mentioned time units – for example, CM+10D (current month plus ten days).
Click OK when you're done.
This sends all contracts within the specified date range for approval in one batch, and the Approval Status field on the Approvals FastTab changes to Pending Approval for each of the contracts.
Automatic update of approval status
If you make a change to one or more of the following header fields, the status of a purchase contract is automatically set to Approval Needed:
- Vendor No.
- Purchaser Code
- Currency Code
- Price Type
- Invoicing Period Code
- Contract Start Date
- Contract End Date
- Auto Approve Within Variance
- Approval Frequency
- Approval Freq. Date Formula
If you make a change to one or more of the following line fields, the status of a purchase contract is also automatically set to Approval Needed:
- Type
- No.
- Price Type
- Currency Code
- Quantity
- Unit Cost
- Amount
- Status
- Prices Incl. VAT
- Amount Incl. VAT
- Start Date
- End Date
- Invoicing Period
Note
Deleting an active purchase contract line also triggers the change in approval status.
To cancel a contract approval request
To cancel an approval request that you've initiated, follow these steps:
- Search () for and select Purchase Contracts.
- In the list of contracts, select the one whose approval you want to cancel.
- On the action bar, click Approve > Cancel Approval Request.
On the Purchase Contract page, the Approval Status field on the Approvals FastTab changes from Pending Approval to Approval Needed.
To submit a contract approval
Once a contract has been sent to you for approval by an approval administrator, you can approve the contract. You can do this in either Business Central or the Continia Web Approval Portal.
Using Business Central
To submit an approval using Business Central:
- Search () for and select Purchase Contracts.
- In the list of contracts, in the No. column, click the number of the contract you want to approve. This opens the Purchase Contract page.
- Review the contract.
- On the action bar, click Request Approval > Approve.
This approves the request, and the Approval Status field on the Approvals FastTab changes to Released.
Using the Web Approval Portal
To submit a review using the Web Approval Portal:
- Sign in to the Web Approval Portal.
- On the Purchase tab, click Contracts to open the My Pending Approvals page.
- In the list of contracts for approval, select the one you want to approve.
- Approve the contract.
- In the text field in the upper-right corner, enter your comments and click Save when you're done. Repeat this step if you have additional comments.
- On the action bar, click Submit Approval.
This sends your approval to the purchase approval administrator. Also, In Business Central, on the Purchase Contract page, the Status field on the Approval FastTab changes to Approval Submitted.
Related information
Creating purchase contracts
Creating contract invoices
Approving contract invoices
Viewing the Purchase Contracts Archive