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Setting Up a Purchasing Budget and Workflow
Setting Up a Purchasing Budget and Workflow

Enterprise Customers Can Create a Custom Purchasing Budget and Workflow

Ty Houy avatar
Written by Ty Houy
Updated over a week ago

Overview

Enterprise customers can configure custom budgets and workflows based on the unique needs of different purchase orders.

Users can easily submit purchase requests and purchase orders, and it allows you to include other members of your team to participate in the approval and payment process as needed.

This article will walk you through how to create and customize a budget and approval workflow.

Table of Contents

Sample Workflow

Here's an example of what your workflow could look like:

Creating a Budget

In the left navigation pane, go to Purchasing > Budgets.

Select “Add a Budget” and give it a name.

The next step is to set up a purchasing workflow. The default workflow only contains three steps: “Setup” (which includes Purchase Requests), “Ready to Receive” (this is the step after approval), and “Closed” (this is where a bill is created and payment is made).

The "PO Setup" and "PO Closed" steps are preconfigured and don’t require any additional setup.

Adding Custom Steps

If your company requires more than one approval before a PO is submitted to a vendor, click “Add Step.”

You'll be able to customize:

Customize: When this step starts....

First, give the step a name, and then select who will be assigned the PO by clicking the blue text under "Automatically assign PO to."

By default, it will be assigned to the user who started the PO.

(Note: you can learn more about roles and teams in Limble in The Different User Roles in Limble and How Multiple People Can Work on a Single Task in Limble.)

You can send an email to the assigned user by enabling "Send email message."

To customize the email message, click on the blue text and the editable template will appear in a new window.

If you choose to customize the email template, you can use placeholders to insert a “variable” into your email (e.g., vendor name, PO date, or items being ordered). Placeholders will automatically populate with the correct information.

Customize: While on this step...

Determine action that can be taken when the workflow is in this step.

Enable the PO to be edited while on this step by checking "PO can be edited."

Enable the ability for PO items to be received while on this step by checking "PO items can be received."

Customize: Move to the next step when...

Once the assigned user has taken necessary action, the PO will move on to the next step unless "Skip step if..." is enabled.

You have several threshold options to choose from.

  1. Click the first set of blue text to choose between "PO Total" or "every PO Item's total." By selecting "PO Total," the system will evaluate the entire PO, whereas selecting "every PO Item's total" will look at each line item.


    For example, you may choose to skip an approval step where a PO's total value is $500, but would need to approve a line item that costs $500.

  2. The second set of blue text allows you to choose to skip a step based on if a value is "less or equal to" and "greater or equal to."

    "Greater or equal to" can be used to expedite approvals to the user with the highest approval authority. For example, user 1 may be able to approve POs that are less than $500, but only user 2 can approve POs $500 or more.


    By using the skip "greater or equal to" threshold of $500 in the step assigned to user 1, you could then create an additional approval step assigned to user 2. This way, POs would bypass user 1 when they don't have approval authority.

Once you're satisfied with your threshold selections, enter the threshold value in the text box.

Ready to Receive

Once you have added your desired steps, you can make changes to your preferences in the "Ready to Receive" step.

In addition to previous configuration options, you will be able to assign a bill to a user and opt to send them an email message when a bill is created.

(Note: you will have all previous configuration options except "Move to the next step when..." since Ready to Receive is the final step in the PO workflow before items are delivered or services are rendered.)

Assigning Default Budgets

Once you’ve finished setting up your workflow, you can set automatic assignments for the budget. Choose one of the following:

  • Default Budget. Make this budget when a user manually starts a PO. Only one budget can be the default budget.

  • Default Budget for Purchase Requests. Make this budget the default budget when a purchase request is submitted. Only one Budget can be the default budget for purchase requests.

  • Default Budget for Min Part Qty POs. Make this budget the default when a PO is started inside of a minimum part quantity task. Minimum part quantity tasks are started when a spare parts inventory goes below its minimum part quantity threshold. Only one budget can be the default for part quantity tasks.

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Still don’t see what you’re looking for? Check out our YouTube channel for more tips and tricks! You can also reach out to us anytime at support@limblecmms.com.

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