Vendor approval

An organization may require that vendors be approved before certain items or groups of items can be purchased from them. An example of this could be a company policy which specifies that vendors must be certified within some sort of safety compliance program if any business is to be transacted. In this type of scenario, not only do vendors need to be marked as approved, but it must also be possible to turn this designation on and off, in the event that a vendor loses a previously obtained certification.

Required Approvals

It may be that only certain items or groups of items must be purchased from approved vendors. This requirement can be specified at the item category, and individual item record levels. The setting at one of these levels will act as a default for the items within the appropriate group. For example, if we indicate that vendor approval is required for a particular item category, by default all items within that item category will require vendor approval, as well as the items in the hierarchy . It is possible to change default settings on a record by record basis, however. Using our previous example, we could remove the approval requirement for a particular item record within the item category.

Working with Approved Vendors

The standard Item/Vendor catalog has been enhanced so that a particular combination of item and vendor can be marked as approved. If an item has been set up to require vendor approval, only a vendor that has been marked as approved can be assigned as the item's default purchase vendor.

In addition to impacting the definition of a purchase vendor, the vendor approval setting will affect item assignment on purchase documents. When a purchase order is created for a vendor, any item for which approval is required must be approved for the relevant vendor before it can be assigned on a purchase line. Attempting to assign an unapproved item to a purchase order will result in the program informing the user that the action is not allowed. You can override this restriction on an individual purchase document by placing a check mark in the Allow Unapproved Items field on the General FastTab.

When an item has variants, the same approval process that exists for combinations of items and vendors is also present for combinations of item variants and vendors. If stockkeeping unit records are created for variants, the purchase vendor for a given SKU must be designated as approved for that variant.

To learn more about the Vendor approval setup, click here