About supplier approvals

Supplier approval adds controls to your supplier creation and supplier update workflow, requiring approval before any new and updated information can be used in Accounts Payable and Purchasing transactions.

How it works

When supplier approval is enabled, suppliers are automatically submitted to the Approve supplier queue after they are created or edited. Approvers that you designate review the supplier records and either approve or decline them.

While a supplier is awaiting approval, or if the supplier is declined, users cannot do the following:

  • Post Accounts Payable and Purchasing transactions for that supplier
  • Edit existing transactions for the supplier
  • Select supplier transactions for payment

Users can save new transactions as drafts, even for submitted or declined suppliers. This allows you to capture new transactions as they comes in, then post them after the supplier is approved. This also means that 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.

When can you edit supplier records?

When supplier approval is enabled, you can edit a supplier as long as the supplier does not have any payment requests that are active in the workflow.

This means that to edit a supplier with active payment requests, you first need to do one of the following: 

  • Complete the payment process.
  • Cancel payment requests to return the AP supplier invoices to an unselected state.
On the View payment requests page, you can see all payment requests that are not yet complete. Filter for the supplier you want to edit to find the payment requests that need to be resolved. Payment requests with a payment status of Draft are payments that were added to the Outbox.

Tracking changes

Track the approval status for suppliers using the following:

  • State field: Visible in the supplier record and on the Suppliers list, this shows whether the supplier is in a Submitted, Approved, or Declined state.
  • History tab: Available on the supplier record when approval is enabled, this shows who created, submitted, and approved or declined the supplier.
  • Audit trail: The audit trail for the supplier record shows field values that were changed when a supplier was edited.

Before you enable supplier approval

Supplier approval uses a single-level approval structure that you configure at the top level. You designate an approver or a pool of approvers by assigning supplier approval permissions.

As part of the setup process, all suppliers are set to the Approved state. Before you begin, review you the supplier list for your company, at both the top level and the entity level, to make sure that you’re ready to record the suppliers as approved. Make any edits necessary.

The admin user who configures approval in Accounts Payable must have approval permissions and be unrestricted. Sage Intacct updates the audit trail to record each supplier as approved and lists the admin user as the one who completed the workflow action. You can remove the approval permission for the admin user after all suppliers are updated.

The process of updating the audit trail might take some time, depending on how many suppliers you have. Users will not be able to add, edit, delete, or import suppliers until the process completes, so you might want to enable this feature during off hours.

When the audit trail update is done, you can update the Suppliers list as needed. Be sure to add any additional approvers necessary and invite them to configure their notifications so that they can receive updates.

Regional availability

Supplier approval is generally available in any region.

Limitations

Supplier 1099 transaction update by CSV import does not support supplier approval. The status for suppliers updated with these import templates remains unchanged after import.