Sales Order Document Approval

Business Central/NAV Developers Forum
1

Hi Forum,

We are in the process of deploying Dynamics NAV 2013 and I have hit a wall when setting up Document Approval. Here is the process I would ideally like to follow:

  1. Service Desk take an order from a customer over the phone and raise as a Sales Order in NAV- any customer could end up speaking with any of the 5 Service Desk Operatives.
  2. Having taken the order the Service Desk Op will “Send Document Approval Request”, which will result in automatic approval provided the customer is within their credit limit. However, if they are not within their credit limit, an approval request should be sent to the Accounts Department.
  3. Anyone in the accounts department should be able to approve the order (or reject it if required).

Although all of our customers have an allocated Sales Rep (which is stored in the “Salesperson Code” field in the customer card) the Sales Rep does not play a part in the approval of the order.

So my questions are:

  1. Can document approval for Credit Limits be setup to disregard the Salesperson Code at all times (I have a problem whereby the approval request seems to make its way back to the Sales Rep in some cases and I seem unable to leave the Salesperson Code field blank on the order to prevent this).
  2. Can approval requests be sent to a group/pool of people, any of which can approve the order, rather than going to an individual.

To give some context, we have around 650 regular customersand process roughly 150 orders per day. About 50% of these orders would require approval (it’s the nature of the people we deal with).

Personally, I have not developed in NAV before but I have experience in Visual Studio so I’m sure I can follow any advice if you can be patient with me.

Thanks in advance for taking the time to read this. Any help would be gratefully received.

Best wishes,

PG9

2

Welcome to DUG!!!

Have you tried the Standard document approval of NAV ???

3

Hi Amol. Thanks for the reply and the welcome.

I’ve tried using Document Approval in its stardard setup but I can’t get round a couple of things. First of all, it seems that only a single person can take responsibility for approvals at any one time. Our accounts team might be 2, 3 or 4 people all approving sales orders at the moment. I ideall want a collective view of all approvals so that any of the Accounts staff can take the next order on the list and approve/reject it irrespective of who created the Sales Order.

Secondly, it seems that the approval “flow” features the Sales Person for the customer placing the order. I don’t want the sales people to be involved in approving the order at all as they are field based and are rarely in the office. Our order processing is relatively fast moving:

  1. Order taken at service desk from customer on phone (average call length is 3 minutes).
  2. If within credit, order goes straight for picking. If not within credit, order goes to accounts for approval before being passed to warehouse for picking.
  3. Order picked and shipped within a couple of hours. 90% or orders are shipped same day.

How flexible is the standard approval process? Is it something I’m missing in order to really simplify this process?

Thanks again

PG9

4

Hi,

Following link might help you for setting up

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd338778.aspx

5

Hi Amol

Thanks again for your response. The link references the basic setup for Approvals but does not address my requirement for multiple “Approvers” for the same approval at the same time or the requirement for the Salesperson to not feature in the approvals process at any time. The basic setup of approvals doesn’t really do what I want it to - is there any significant configuration allowed against the workflow to mean approval happens between a group of Sales Order Processors and a group of Approvers?

Many thanks

PG9

6

Have you check Addtional Approvers setup in Document Approval ??

7

Hi Amol

Yes, the “additional approvers” means that a document has to be approved by multiple people in a specific order before it can be released. I’m looking for the document to be approved by only 1 person of the pool of 4.

Any other ideas gratefully received.

Thanks

PG9

8

Hi,

Below a workaround for your multi-user approbation process without modification.

1- Set a new user in your domain named ‘Approver Group’

2 - Set an email that regroup all of those users.

3 - Define this new user as the approver INTO nav

4 - When an approbation is requested, all users will receive an email to approve.

5- The one that will approve this request will need to connect to NAV with this new user account instead of his windows login.

Hope that this can help you

kARIM

9

Hi Karim

Thanks for your suggestion. This goes some way to resolve the problem but it does mean that the person who approves the order is not then logged - just the “new user” account name will be logged.

I’m resigning myself to the fact that modification/programming is going to be required to do this. Thanks to all who have viewed the post and to Amol and Karim for their suggestions.

Regards

PG9

10

The approval can be by “Salesperson” or “User ID”.

The Exchange Server can create a group email address that a group of users can receive the email.

Say name as “Accounts Group”, for the approval id, just set to this “Group Email”. So although the approval request is sent to only one ID, all accounting personnel in this group will receive the email. Maybe this will solve the problem.