Understand procurement governance
Understand — Procurement & Approvals.
How procurement governance works in B2B commerce, before any of it becomes a screen you click.
Procurement governance is three subjects that get discussed as one: what a purchasing department protects, how a signature is routed, and which document exists while it waits. Keeping them apart is most of the work. Read the three articles in order. The first gives you the vocabulary a customer's Einkaufsleiterin uses, the second lets you recognise her policy as one of four known shapes, and the third explains why the order is created last and what follows from that for stock, prices and your ERP.
Cockpit screens: planned. The cost-centre, budget, approval-rule and
purchase-request screens are not yet available on your tenant. The concepts on
these pages hold regardless, and the customer conversation does not wait for
the screens; where an article 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) and the free-text
cost centre on order lines and order-list positions (see
Cost centres and budgets).
If you read only one article before a customer meeting, read the first.
- 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.