Who this feature is for

The supplier approval workflow automates the supplier vetting process for any organisation that has a formal policy for vendor vetting and qualification, or organisations that perform vendor qualification on a sporadic basis, e.g. for some of their bigger projects.

This process often involves various departments such as finance, legal, security and might include the approval of supplier contracts. Organising it in a way to get all the necessary approvals and the new supplier approved on time can be a tall order.

Here, ApprovalMax can help with the new workflow: requesters enter the supplier data and then the supplier approval request automatically passes through all the steps while timely notifications get sent to the approvers. The good news is with approval automation, you can’t miss a step or unintentionally change the predefined procedure. Plus, once an approval is complete, all steps are logged in an automatically generated audit trail.

How it works

Contact (vendor) approval is a new approval workflow type. Before you can use it, you’ll need to activate it in the “Workflows” menu and set it up. This requires an active connection to Xero or QuickBooks Online.

Once the workflow is active, this is what happens:

• A new contact (vendor) is created and submitted for approval in ApprovalMax.
• ApprovalMax starts the multi-step approval workflow according to the specified rules.
• The respective managers get notified that their approval is required and make their decision.
• When all approvals are in place, the contact (vendor) status changes to “Authorised” and the contact (vendor) is created in ApprovalMax.