Would be great if we could have an approval matrix and workflow for purchase orders as well as the permissions available.
For more sizeable/less routine purchase orders I would want there to be a couple of sets of eyes on the PO being raised at the appropriate levels to ensure we’re not committing to an unfavourable contract. Of course we can manage this through other offline means outside of Breww, but having the approval workflow through Breww would provide an extra level of comfort and security in this area.
We could fairly simply add a permission level required to allow PO sign-off (a bit like we have on cleaning/maintenance records), then a setting to say all (or no) PO need sign-off.
But would you like more than this? If so, how do you see it working? Would you want to build rules (e.g. POs below £100 can be approved by anyone, below £1000 needs two approvers, and others need 3 approvers)? Or did you have something else in mind, such as over £1000 can only be approved by a specific person?
We want to make sure we build something that works for smaller breweries who want simpler control as well as being capable of more complex rules that may be required by bigger breweries. Cheers!
I think certainly stage 1 for simplicity would work to start with, and at least ensure 2 sets of eyes on a purchase being made. And maybe (hopefully), not be too significant in terms of dev work if the functionality exists elsewhere.
However, it would be good to try and move to an approval matrix design whereby if thresholds are breached then the sign-off flips up the hierarchy.
Like you suggest in the e.g.
£100 approved by anyone.
£1,000 needs person ordering + line manager/department head (named person),
£5,000 needs person ordering + Dept Head + COO/CFO
All hypothetical limits and thresholds etc. but conceptually this is what exists in our current purchase order system and hierarchy workflow currently, so would be keen to mirror this to ensure that similar levels of control are in place.
Am sure that some smaller teams would turn this functionality off, but be good to have the option.
Thanks, yes, that all makes sense. We’ll give this some more thought on how to go about it.
If anyone else would like this, please give this thread a vote (and @isaac-parnell if you can too that would useful for us as the votes are very important).
We would be very keen on this idea… allowing brewery staff to raise PO’s but needing mgt sign off to approve would save a huge amount of time and effort
Having our team be able to raise there own Purchase orders and a member of the management team can approve.
At the moment the team are having to email our ops director their requests and he has had to raise the purchase orders, which is not a good use of his time or the company money.
Bumping this as its been a few months - we would also find this useful.
If we could set approval limits that would be ideal but even if its just a simple fix that says only people within a certain permission group can “Finalise” purchase orders that would also be really helpful.
My concern with creating a simple permission level of who can “Finalise” purchase orders is that although this would be a nice quick fix for now, it might make it much harder to support the tiered/matrix approach later, and I think that would be such a good feature to have ultimately.
I’ve made sure this is on the next dev team meeting agenda to see if we can do something soon that doesn’t burn any bridges for the ultimate version.
Possibly a good solution would be to leverage our new “rule builder” widget (built for delivery rules) to give the most flexibility. How does that sound to you (and everyone else looking for this)?
I think if the rule builder used for deliveries could be used for purchases also that would be really helpful. Then you could build out different rules based on order value and product type.
Good news - it’s looking like we’ll be able to fit this into the schedule soon (with a rule builder based solution). We’ll let you know when it’s ready
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