The review and approval flow

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. When you send a batch for approval, you use the filtering options, for example, Next Approval Date to send all contracts up for approval on the same date for approval, or Approval Status to send all contracts with the status Approval Needed off for approval.

Approve the request

As the approver, you can review and approve the purchase contract from the list of contracts pending your approval.

• From the Role Center, select the Pending Approval Cue, open the relevant purchase contract, and select Approve in the action bar. Depending on your approval rights, you'll have access to approve, reject, or forward the approval request.

If the Document Approval module is activated, you have additional options: you can force-approve a request or add comments if changes or clarifications are needed before you can approve. Some approvers can also approve purchase contracts from the Continia Web Approval Portal, which is especially useful for those who don’t work in Business Central daily. The Continia Web Approval Portal provides essentially the same contract approval options as in Business Central.

For details about how to navigate to the Continia Web Approval Portal, please refer to the article Purchase Contract Approvals on Continia Docs.

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)