Order approval

Some customer companies might want to allow a large number of their employees to place orders through Infor e-Commerce, but would like to have their purchasing manager (approver) inspect and approve any orders over a certain amount. Infor e-Commerce provides an order-approval system that allows customer companies to apply a minimum approval limit (MAL) to each user. Any submitted order that is equal to or exceeds the purchasing user’s MAL is forwarded to the purchase manager rather than to the merchant. A user cannot enter credit card information at this stage.

An email message to the purchase manager is generated automatically, asking the user to log in to the Infor e-Commerce Customer Center and inspect the order. After inspecting the order, the manager can either submit to the merchant for processing, or reject it, thereby notifying the user. The manager can add comments when rejecting an order, for example to tell the purchaser why the order has been rejected. The approved order is sent back to the user. The user can enter the credit card information and submit the order. For details about payment handling for orders requiring approval, see Implement payment systems.

Note: Order approval does not apply to users that have the reseller administrator role; the MAL setting is ignored for these users. This is because a reseller administrator can assign MALs and approvers to all users at his or her company (including himself or herself), so enforced approval does not make sense for these users.

Configuring approval-required users

Users for whom approval is required must be configured with the following:

  • A minimum approval limit (MAL)

  • An approver

  • A user role that includes the "Order Approval Required" feature element. See Roles, segments, and feature elements. In the default Infor e-Commerce setup, this element is part of the "To Be Approved" user role.

All of these settings can be made by the reseller administrator working on the Customer Center. See Roles assignable by resellers for instructions about how to access these. MAL, role assignments and approver assignment can also be made by the merchant administrator working on the Business Center. See Customer users.

Note: Order approval is only available to users who are set up to pay by invoice (not by credit card).

See Administering payment methods for details about assigning payment methods to user segments.

Configuring approver users

An approver must be assigned to each user whose orders require approval. Usually, this is either the purchase manager at the customer company, the user’s manager or some other employee who is responsible for the budget into which the order is eventually be accounted.

When the reseller administrator configures a user for approval (see above), he or she must select from a list of possible approvers.

This list can only include users who are both from the same customer company and who have a user role that includes the "Order Approver" feature element (see Roles, segments, and feature elements). In the default Infor e-Commerce setup, this element is part of the "Approver" user role, which can be assigned by both, the merchant administrator working in the Business Center. See Customer users and the reseller administrator for users at his or her own company. See Roles assignable by resellers.

In case of a multi-customer user, an approver and approval limit can be setup for each of the available companies. When selecting an approver for one of the companies, the multi-customer user can choose from the approver users within that company.

For example, John belongs to Company A. Company A had B, C and D as child companies. John can setup approver and approval limit for companies B, C, D and including his own company. When selecting the approver, John can choose from the approver users within that company. Thus, John has four different approvers, one for each company. Also, John can have different approval limits. For Company A his MAL may be 4000 USD, whereas for Company his approval limit may be 200 GBP.

Order-approval messages

If you would like to customize the email messages associated with order approval, see Order-approval messaging.