Approve and send a purchase order

Steps 2 and 3 of the standard procurement workflow: get the purchase order approved, if your company uses approvals, then finalise it so the warehouse and accounts payable can pull from it. It follows Step 1, where you raised the order; Before you start lists the Knock Off Configuration rows and permissions this needs. The running example is 200 wireless earbuds at RM 128 each from an accessory wholesaler, for branch GS-KV-01 (Meet GadgetSphere).

1. Step 2: get the order approved, only if you have set approvals up.
2. Step 3: finalise and send the order.

Step 2: Get the order approved — only if you have set approvals up

Purchasing > Purchase Order (Internal) > (open the order) > Generic Doc Approval tab

This step is optional, and on a new tenant it does nothing, because approvals in BigLedger are off until someone configures them. There is no approval check anywhere in the document lifecycle: a purchase order saves and finalises exactly the same whether an approval setting exists, does not exist, or exists with a request still sitting unanswered. It is a sign-off trail, not a gate.

If your finance manager has created an Approval Setting for INTERNAL_PURCHASE_ORDER under Settings > Approval Settings, then open the saved order, go to the Generic Doc Approval tab, and click Submit For Approval. BigLedger e-mails each approver a link to a page where they Approve or Reject with remarks.

The order is set to FINAL the moment the first approver approves — not when the last level does. BigLedger runs the move to FINAL on every approval it processes, so on a two-level rule the level-1 approval finalises the order while the level-2 request is still in someone’s inbox. Level 2 is still e-mailed and the approval record only reads Approved when they act, but the document has already moved. And a pending request locks nothing: anyone with the finalise permission can still press FINAL by hand while the approval sits unanswered.

Two things worth knowing before you rely on it:

• The number of approval levels a document needs is decided by its amount. Each level carries a minimum approval amount, and a document needs every level whose minimum it exceeds. With levels set at RM 0, RM 10,000 and RM 50,000, our RM 25,600 order needs two approvals; a RM 500 order needs one.
• There is no escalation, no reminder e-mail, and no delegation or stand-in approver. If your approver is on leave, the order sits. Chase them directly.

Purchase orders, purchase requisitions and stock requisitions are the only document types with an approval engine at all. There is none for GRNs, purchase invoices, payment vouchers, sales documents, journals or stock adjustments — for those, your control is who holds the finalise permission.

Step 3: Finalise and send the order

Purchasing > Purchase Order (Internal) > (open the order) > FINAL

Click FINAL. The order locks — you can no longer change the lines — and its 200 units enter the open queue, ready for the warehouse and for accounts payable to pull from. That queue row is written only because your company’s Knock Off Configuration has a Purchase Order → Purchase GRN row; without it the order goes FINAL just the same and the warehouse’s search finds nothing.

Nothing has posted. Your stock balance has not moved and your ledger has not changed, and that is correct: a purchase order is a promise, not a transaction.

Send the order to your supplier from the Export tab, using whichever printable format your tenant has set up.

If you need to see what is still outstanding across all your orders, the Purchase Order Queue menu lists the open-queue rows — the lines you have committed to but not yet received. (It is not an approval queue, despite the name.) The PO Line with GRN KO and PO Line with PI KO reports show the same lines matched against what has actually been received and invoiced.

Watch out for: CLOSE and VOID are different things. CLOSE sets every line’s open quantity to zero and deletes the queue rows — use it when a supplier tells you the balance of an order is never coming and you want it out of your outstanding list. VOID cancels the document. Neither can be undone.

What success looks like for this part

The order is FINAL and sent to the supplier from the Export tab, its 200 units are in the open queue ready for the GRN (with the Purchase Order → Purchase GRN row in place), and your stock balance has not moved. When the order is complete, run the whole order’s success check.

Common mistakes in this part

Assuming the approval workflow is stopping anything. It is not. Until someone creates an approval setting, no document in BigLedger requires anyone’s sign-off, and even with one configured a purchase order can still be finalised by hand while a request sits pending. If unauthorised purchasing is the risk you are managing, control it with the finalise permission, not with the approval tab.

Next: Step 4, receive the goods.

Related documentation

• Standard Procurement Workflow: the whole order, with its success check.
• Document Approvals: what an approval setting does and does not stop.
• Purchase Order (Internal): the screen reference.