Approval

Approvals sits between creating a document and acting on it. When a Purchase Order, Sales Order, Invoice, Goods Receipt Note, Payment Request, Expense Claim, Contract, or Budget Request reaches a monetary threshold or triggers your organization’s sign-off policy, it needs to pass through this module before it can move forward. The document is locked while the approval is pending, up to three approvers review it in sequence, and every decision is logged for audit purposes.

Without this gate, anyone could commit the business to a high-value purchase or contract without the right authority reviewing it first. With it, routine low-risk items can be waved through automatically, high-value items get proper scrutiny, and there’s a permanent record of who approved what and when.

Raising an approval request

Getting there

Go to Admin › Approvals › Create Request. Some source modules also offer a Submit for Approval button directly on the document, which pre-fills the document type and request ID for you.

The request is built through a four-step wizard, with a live summary panel on the right that updates as you go.

Step 1: Document Info

Document Type — select the kind of document you’re seeking approval for. This determines what appears in the next field.

Request ID — once you’ve chosen a document type, this dropdown loads the eligible open records from that module. If nothing eligible exists, it tells you so and you can’t proceed. If the document you want already has an active approval request in progress, you’ll be blocked here too — only one active request is allowed per document at a time.

Amount/Value and Currency — the monetary value being approved. This feeds any auto-approval rule you set up later.

Department — optional, but worth setting if you want the department head copied on notifications later; that option is disabled entirely if you skip this.

Deadline — mandatory. This drives the overdue flag in the list view, though missing it doesn’t trigger any automatic rejection or escalation on its own.

Priority — Low, Medium, or High. This is purely a visual triage cue for approvers; it doesn’t change routing or notifications in any way.

Comments/Justification — mandatory, up to 500 characters, with a live counter as you type.

Supporting files — optional. PDF, PNG, or JPG only, up to 10 MB each.

Leaving the Deadline or Comments field blank blocks you from moving to Step 2.

Step 2: Approvers

Choose the Number of Approval Levels — 1, 2, or 3. An entry block appears for each level you select.

For each level, enter the Approver Name and Approver Email (both mandatory — email format is checked), and optionally a Role/Designation and an Approval Limit.

The Approval Limit is worth understanding correctly: it’s advisory only. If the request amount exceeds what an approver is authorized for, the system flags it, but it doesn’t stop that approver from approving anyway unless your organization has configured a stricter rule in System Settings.

Auto-Approval Mode — choose from Disabled, Amount Below Threshold, Same Department Head Approver, or Trusted Vendor/Recurring Order. If you choose Amount Below Threshold, an Auto-Approve Threshold field appears and is required.

This check runs before anything else. At submission, the system evaluates your auto-approval rule first — if the conditions are met, the request resolves immediately without ever entering the manual queue, and no human approver is notified.

Step 3: Notifications

Five toggles control what gets sent:

• Email approvers on submission — on by default
• Send automatic reminders — off by default; if enabled, a pending approver who hasn’t acted within 48 hours gets a re-sent notification, repeating until they act or the request is recalled
• Notify requester on final decision — on by default
• CC department head — disabled if you didn’t set a department in Step 1
• Audit trail notification — off by default; sends a summary to the compliance team once the request resolves

Step 4: Review

A read-only summary of everything entered across the previous three steps. From here you can:

Save Draft — stores the request without submitting it. The source document isn’t locked, no notifications go out, and the draft is visible only to you. You can save a draft even with incomplete mandatory fields, and return to finish it later.

Submit for Approval — validates every mandatory field across all four steps. If anything’s missing, the wizard jumps back to whichever step has the problem, with the field highlighted. If everything checks out, the system generates an Approval ID (formatted like APR-0042), locks the source document as “Pending Approval,” and notifies the Level 1 approver.

How approval routing works

Approvals are strictly sequential — there’s no parallel routing. Level 2 is only notified after Level 1 approves; Level 3 only after Level 2 approves.

At each level, the approver reviews the request — either in the ERP’s detailed view or via the notification email — and clicks Approve or Reject.

If approved and more levels remain, the request advances to the next level and that approver is notified. If it’s the final level, the request moves to Approved, the source document unlocks, and the requester is notified.

If rejected at any level, the request moves straight to Rejected. The pipeline stops immediately — higher levels are never notified — and the source document stays locked until a new request is submitted or the underlying document is revised.

Recalling a request

You can recall your own request, but only while it’s sitting at “Pending Approval (Level 1)” and before that approver has taken any action. Recalling returns the request to Draft, unlocks the source document, and cancels any scheduled notifications.

Once Level 1 has approved or rejected, recall is no longer available — at that point the only way back is to let the current pipeline resolve.

After approval

Once a request reaches Approved, the source document unlocks and can move on to its next step in its own module — a Purchase Order proceeds to Goods Receipt, a Sales Order to Delivery, an Invoice to Payment. The Approval ID gets stamped onto the source document as a permanent reference.

The full audit trail — submission, every level’s decision, timestamps, and any notes — stays attached to the request and is visible from its detailed view. Approved and Rejected requests are read-only from that point forward; if the document needs approval again, a new request has to be raised.

Who can approve

Approving or rejecting a request requires two things: being named as the current-level approver on that specific request, and having the underlying “Approve Approval” permission granted to your role. Approvers don’t have to be system users — the email-only flow supports external approvers who act purely through the notification email.