Purchase Orders and Approvals

Transcript

Today I’ll be walking through how purchase orders allow B2B buyers to track and control spending using Adobe Commerce. So workflows for buying things are common throughout our lives. Whether it’s asking a parent for permission to buy an expensive new video game or getting your manager vote for that shiny new curved monitor, organizations need a process of checks and balances to control their spending. So companies use purchase orders to control what employees can purchase on behalf of the company and often set up approval rules to enforce company guidelines. Purchase order, like one that you can see here is like a statement of intent. I want to make this purchase. It then needs to be approved to become an actual order. So you can see here in the storefront, as an administrator I’m looking at an approved purchase order, there’s comments, a history log, and once this purchase order is approved, it then becomes an actual order. So now I’m going to switch from the storefront and the buyer perspective to the admin panel and show you for a merchant for an admin agent, how to enable this functionality. So I’m going to go to stores, configuration payment methods, and under payment methods, purchase order. I can choose whether it’s enabled or disabled at the website level for certain countries as well as at the company level. So when I go to take a look at those other companies, I can see here with Prestige Worldwide, I can go to advanced settings and enable/disable purchase orders. So now I’ll go into a little bit more about how those workflows work in those companies. So I’m going to go here. Again, I’m back in the storefront, I’m an administrator, and I’m going to show you what one of these rules looks like. So say ability to create these rules is dependent on the user’s permissions. In this case I’m an admin and so I’m creating those company structures and the rules for our buying workflows. So when I go into this rule, I can see if it’s enabled or disabled, I can see the rule name as well as the description. And basically what this rule is is saying for those junior buyers in my organization, they need to get an administrator’s approval before they can make large orders. You know, we’ve been trying to control spending. There’s been some err purchases in the past. We want a way to burn ourselves and have a self-service way to create these workflows so that our buying organization can set up our own policies for purchasing. So I can choose who it applies to. In this case, the purchaser, and then we’ll type. So if it’s over X amount of dollars, if the shipping costs is high, if there’s a large number of skew complexity. This is giving me an easy way to set up my own workflows within the storefront here. So in this way, I can place an order, a purchase order, and then an administrator can come in here and say okay junior buyer, yes, that looks like a good order. I’m going to go ahead and approve it. And then the order goes through. So purchase orders are like the other workflows we have for buying things in our lives. They allow companies to track and control their spending in an easy self-service way to set up those policies for purchasing. To learn more about purchase orders, you can go to our commerce user guide here and you can see more information about how purchase orders work and the different approval roles that you can make. -