Approving Orders
Once an order has been created, it goes through various steps before becoming a fully approved, completed order. There are system configurations, user permissions, and other site settings that can affect the order approval process. This document will walk you through how to approve orders, and how system configurations and permissions can affect what users see during the process.
To begin, here is an overview of each stage of the approval process.
Publisher/Organization - The first step of the approval process, publisher approval is an internal review of the order to make sure everything on the order is correct before sending it to your customer.
Client – Once an order has been publisher approved, it can be sent to the client for a signature. Customers can approve orders digitally through their Client Center, or you can approve the order on their behalf within the system.
Sales – Not every order will need to go through the sales approval step. On each user, you can set a ‘Sales Approver’. If a rep creates an order and they have a sales approver, once the order has been client approved, their sales approver has to approve the order before it can be sent to finance.
Finance – Whether the order has just been client or sales approved, finance approval is the final step of the order approval process. A final check to make sure everything is set up correctly, when finance approving an order you can make changes to commissions and installment plans. Once an order is finance approved, it moves from being a pending order, to being a 100% complete order.
There are also some important system configurations and user permissions that affect the order approval process.
The system configuration ‘Automatically approve Orders’ determines whether your orders will be automatically approved or not, and if so at which stage of the approval process. There are four options for this configuration: No, Publisher, Client, and Finance. The option you choose determines what stage of approval an order is in when a user first enters the order into the system. To edit this configuration, go to Settings > System Configurations – Sales – Orders.
No – setting the system to no means the order will not be automatically approved. The order will require manual approval by a manager, the client, and finance.
Publisher – setting the system to publisher bypasses the Publisher level of approval. The order will be created at 90% and be publisher approved, which will then need to be manually approved by the client and finance.
Client – setting the system to client means the order gets automatically approved at the Publisher and Client levels. The order will be created at 95% and be client approved and will still need manual approval from finance.
Finance – setting the system to finance means all stages of the order approval process will happen automatically; you will not need to manually approve the order at all. It will be considered a 100% approved order as soon as it is created.
Tip
It is highly recommended that you require all orders to go through Publisher approval, especially when you are first starting out. This will ensure that your sales reps are setting up the orders properly, and the pricing is correct.
There is another system configuration to ‘Auto-Finance Approve Company Orders’. To edit this configuration, go to Settings > System Configurations – Sales – Orders. When this configuration is set to Yes, orders for companies that are outside of your new account threshold will automatically be finance approved, even if you require manual finance approval. You may want to use this configuration if you only want the finance team to approve orders for new companies; maybe do a credit check or make sure the first payment is provided in advance.
If you require other levels of approval, you will still need to go through those before finance approval. For instance if you require Publisher and Client approval, those will still need to be done. Then once Client approved, the order will get automatically Finance approved.
A few user permissions are also relevant here. You’ll need to give your users the ‘Access Order Approvals’ permission if you want them to be able to approve orders. This permission also gives users access to the Sales > Approve Orders page. There are sub-permissions for each level of approval, including the ability to Publisher, Client, and Finance approve orders. If a user does not have permission to access order approvals, they will not be able to approve orders at any stage.
To approve an order, you can either go to the Sales > Approve Orders page, or go to a specific company, click on their Orders tab, and use the ellipsis icon on a pending order to use the Approve action.
On both the Approve Orders page and the Orders tab, orders that are awaiting some level of approval will show some information about the order, as well as showing the ‘Approval History’.
There are three boxes that show up under the Approval History column, labeled P, C, and F. P represents Publisher approval, C represents Client approval, and F represents Finance approval.
If the P, C, or F box is red, it means the order has not yet received that level of approval. If the box is green, it means it has gotten that level of approval. For instance, if you see a pending order with green P and C boxes, and a red F box, it means the order has been client approved, and is waiting on finance approval.
To approve the order from the Approve Orders page, click on the Approve Order action on the right side of the table. Clicking on the order number will open the PDF. To approve the order from the Orders tab, use the ellipsis icon and click the Approve Order button. Both of these options will open the approval page for whatever stage of approval the order is on.
Note
If you do not have the permission to approve an order, you may see a ‘Submit for Approval’ action, rather than an ‘Approve Order’ action. This will send an email to your manager prompting them to review the order.
At each stage of the process, there is the option to Approve or Not Approve the order. You can use the radio buttons to switch between the two options, and then click Submit when you’ve made your selection.
Note
If the order is not approved at the finance level, it will be rolled back to publisher approval, and will require both the publisher and client to approve the order again once the appropriate changes are made.
Added 10/18/2022