Procurement
Build approval and budget workflows
The person who chooses an article in a B2B company is rarely the person who may commit the money. Between them sits a purchasing rule: a cost centre, a budget, an approval limit, a sign-off chain. A shop that ignores that rule cannot be used inside the company. This guide is about reproducing the rule faithfully, so that ordering in your shop complies with the buyer's own procurement policy instead of bypassing it.
Cockpit screens: planned. The procurement screens are not yet available on
your tenant: cost-centre master data, budgets and their ledger, the
approval-rules engine, the purchase-request queue, procurement reports, and the
customer's own admin portal. The concepts on these pages are real and worth
settling with the customer now; where a page describes a Cockpit flow, it
describes how it will work once it ships. What you can already use today: the
Approval limit and the role on every contact under CRM › Contacts and
CRM › Roles (see Approval rules),
the registration queue with its Awaiting approval tab (see
Approve registrations), and a
free-text cost centre on every order line and order-list position (see
Cost centres and budgets).
How this relates to the Customers guide. The Customers guide documents what
ships today: the two fields on a contact, and the cost centre carried on an
order line. This guide teaches the full model those fields grow into: cost
centres as master data, budgets with a ledger, rules with conditions and
effects, purchase requests. Read the Customers guide for what to configure this
week. Read this one for what to agree with the customer's Einkauf before the
screens arrive.
Understand
- How procurement governance works — What a purchasing department is protecting, and the four controls it uses.
- Approval models — Single approver, chains, parallel, value bands, deputies.
- Purchase requests vs. orders — A request is not yet an order, and the difference matters for stock and invoicing.
Set up
- Cost centres — What travels on the order line today, and the master data that is planned.
- Budgets — Amount, period, rollover, soft vs. hard limit: the model to agree now.
- Approval rules — The approval limit you can set today, and the rules engine that follows.
- Buyer spend limits — The per-contact approval limit, and how it will interact with rules.
- Let the customer administer it themselves — What your Innendienst does today, and what the customer's admin will take over.
Work with it
- The buyer's path: submit for approval — What the buyer sees and does.
- The approver's path: approve, reject, delegate — Queue, notifications, decision, comment.
- Reading the budget ledger — Reserved, committed, spent, remaining.
- Procurement reports for your customer — Spend by cost centre, approvals by approver, cycle time.
Keep it healthy
- Approvals that get stuck — Approver on holiday, budget exhausted, rule loop.
- Procurement data hygiene — Stale cost centres, orphaned budgets, approvers who left.