Review and approve pending contracts

If you have enabled purchase contract approval, newly created contracts must be reviewed and approved before they become active in Document Capture, and existing purchase contracts must be reviewed and approved periodically to make sure that they're up to date, renewed, cancelled, or modified.

The process for both types of reviews are essentially the same except from who initiates the approval process:

• For new contracts, it's typically an accountant, with limited approval rights, who initiates the process by sending the new contract, or a batch of contracts for approval directly from the Purchase Contracts page.

• For existing and active purchase contracts that are up for their periodic review, the designated approver will be notified on the Role Center when it's time to review and approve the contract.

Send an approval request

To send a purchase contract for approval, open the individual purchase contract and, in the action bar, select Request Approval > Send Approval Request.

This sends the contract for approval straight away to the approver specified in the Purchaser Code field and the Status field changes to Pending Review.

You can also send approval requests from the list of all purchase contracts. You can choose to send an individual contract for approval or send multiple contracts for approval in a batch.

To send a batch for approval, you use filtering options to identify which contracts should be sent for approval. For example, you can filter by Next Approval Date to send all contracts due for approval on a specific day, or by Approval Status to send all contracts with the status "Approval Needed" for approval.

Approve the request

The available approval options depend on whether the Document Approval module is activated in your company. The differences can be summarized as follows:

• With the Standard approval process, you can schedule periodic contract reviews to update or cancel any unwanted subscriptions in a timely manner. This option provides a simple, streamlined approval process along with the ability to set up automatic approval for recurring invoices.

• If the Document Approval module is activated, you gain access to all the advanced features familiar from purchase document approvals, including:

  • Using the Continia Web Approval Portal for approving contracts
  • Enabling force approval
  • Adding approval comments
  • Using enhanced functionality for forwarding an approval

As the approver, you can review and approve the purchase contract from several places:

• The list of pending purchase contracts:
• The Purchase Contract Approval Entries page:
• The Continia Web Approval Portal

The list of pending purchase contracts

From the Role Center, you can access a list of all the purchase contracts that require approval and from there review and approve contracts assigned to you.

• From the Role Center, select the Pending Approval Cue, open the relevant purchase contract, and select Approve in the action bar. You have the option to approve, reject, or forward the approval request.

The Purchase Contract Approval Entries page

If you're already familiar with how to approve purchase documents from the Purchase Approval Entries page, you may want to approve purchase contracts from a similar view: the Purchase Contracts Approval Entries page. From here you have an common overview of all the purchase contracts that require your attention, and the lines and available approval comments for the selected contract.

You can approve, reject, forward the approval request by selecting a record in the list and then selecting the relevant action.

If you need information that isn't visible in the Purchase Contracts Approval Entries page, in the action bar, you can select Purchase Contract to open the contract and see all the details. The options for approval are also available from there, in the action bare, under Approve.

The Continia Web Approval Portal

The web-based approval portal, especially useful for approvers who don’t work in Business Central on a daily basis. It requires the Document Approval module to be activated in your company and for the individual user the Continia Web Approval Portal option must be selected in the Approval Client field on the Continia User Setup Card. The Continia Web Approval Portal provides essentially the same contract approval options as in Business Central.

If the Document Approval module is activated, you have the following additional approval options available to you regardless of where you approve the purchase contracts:

• Force-approval: Enables you to force-approve a contract in situations where maybe the designated approver is unavailable. This feature must be enabled for you on the Continia User Setup.
• Add comments: Ability to add comments to the approval request which can be useful if you think any changes or clarifications are needed before you can approve the contract.
• Approval sharing: Enables you to have all of your approval tasks automatically forwarded to another approver for a period of time, in case you're unable to approve documents yourself during that period. The other approver will then act as your substitute until you're available again.

The Purchase Contracts Archive

Every time the status of a purchase contract changes, the change is logged in the purchase contract archive. For example, a new log entry is created automatically whenever a contract is sent for approval, when the request has been canceled, approved, rejected, or forwarded.

From the Purchase Contracts page, you can access the archive if you need it for statistical or other purposes. Simply select the relevant contract and, in the action bar, select Contract > Archived Versions.

Other resources

• Purchase Contract Approvals (Continia Docs article)
• Approve Documents using the Web Approval Portal (Continia Learn unit)