About supplier approvals

Use supplier approvals to control who can create or update suppliers. Changes remain pending until an approver reviews and approves them, helping maintain accurate supplier records before they can be used in Accounts Payable or Purchasing transactions.

How it works

  1. Create or update a supplier.

  2. Sage Intacct routes the supplier to approvers.

  3. The supplier remains unavailable for Accounts Payable and Purchasing transactions until approved.

  4. Approvers either approve or decline the supplier.

  5. If declined, the submitter can update the supplier and resubmit it.

What users cannot do while approval is pending

  • Create Accounts Payable or Purchasing transactions for the supplier.

  • Edit existing transactions for the supplier.

  • Select supplier transactions for payment.

What users can do while approval is pending

  • Users can save transactions as drafts, even for declined suppliers.

    Post drafts after the supplier is approved. Incoming draft transactions from AP Automation are saved normally.

  • If a supplier is declined, the submitter can edit the supplier record and resubmit it for approval.

  • Transactions outside of Accounts Payable or Purchasing can reference any supplier regardless of the supplier state.

Customer refunds and supplier approvals

Suppliers automatically created from customer refunds can participate in standard supplier approval workflows. Admins can configure Accounts Payable to skip supplier approvals for suppliers created automatically from customer refunds when approval review is not required. Existing suppliers linked to customers continue to follow the standard approval workflow.

Existing suppliers linked to customers continue to follow the standard supplier approval workflow.

When can you edit supplier records?

When supplier approval is enabled, you can edit a supplier only if there are no active payment requests associated with that supplier.

To edit a supplier that has active payment requests:

Tracking changes

Track supplier approval status using the following information:

  • The State field on the supplier record and Supplier list: See whether the supplier is Submitted, Approved, or Declined.
  • The History tab on the supplier record: View who submitted, approved, or declined the supplier.
  • The Audit trail for the supplier record: Review changes made to supplier fields.

Before you enable supplier approval

Review existing suppliers

Supplier approval is configured at the top level. Assign a supplier approver or approvers by granting supplier approval permissions.

When you enable supplier approval, all existing suppliers are automatically approved. Before you enable supplier approval, review the Suppliers list at the top level and entity level and make necessary changes.

Prepare for processing

The administrator who enables supplier approval must have supplier approval permissions and access to all supplier records. Sage Intacct updates every existing supplier to the Approved state and records the administrator as the user who completed the workflow action.

The initial audit trail update can take time, depending on the number of suppliers. Until processing is complete, users cannot add, edit, delete, or import suppliers. Consider enabling supplier approval during off hours.

After enabling supplier approval

After processing is complete, verify the following information:

  • Add additional approvers, if necessary.

  • Ask approvers to configure their notifications so they can receive approval updates.

  • Remove supplier approval permissions from the administrator account if they’re no longer needed.

Limitations

Supplier approval is not supported for 1099 transaction updates imported using CSV templates. Suppliers updated through these imports retain their existing approval status.