Non-Catalogue Purchase

If your company allows a requisitioner to purchase non-catalogue items, it is important that these non-catalogue purchases are routed to a designated person for review and editing.

Non-catalogue tasks should generally be handled as the first task in an Approval Plan:

The first reason is that when a non-catalogue item is added to a requisition the only field populated for the item might be the (mandatory) description. Approver review may be forced to add any missing information including the name of a supplier (mandatory) or price information. If therefore non-catalogue item approval appears after approval steps for (for example) suppliers or financial limits, these steps would be missed if non-catalogue item editing updated these fields to the extent that they would ordinarily require approval.

The second reason to place non-catalogue approval as the first step in your plan, is that if a supplier has not been selected (i.e. left as ‘Unknown’) it becomes a mandatory editing task by the approver. The approver who receives such requisitions for approval must therefore be able to select a correct supplier if required.

It is also advisable to route non-catalogue approval through a requisition type approval plan rather than a purchase order type plan. This is because: if no supplier is assigned, a PO plan will create a single purchase order upon submission, assigned to a supplier called ‘Unknown’. If there is more than one item on the order and they require sourcing from different suppliers, this is not possible since a single order containing all items has been created. The supplier must be updated and the items to be ordered from this supplier left on the order. Any item not to be ordered from this supplier must be deleted and added to a new requisition for inclusion on a separate order.

To set up the task in an Approval Plan:

Click one of the ‘Insert’ buttons, depending upon where you require the task.
Call the new task ‘Non-catalogue Approval’ by typing this into the Task Name field.
Select the Action ‘Request Approval’ from the drop down selection box.
Fill in the eMail and audit trail messages that you want PECOS P2P to generate by clicking on the hyperlinks.
Optionally determine if you would like this task to be escalated by selecting a timeframe and units of time.
Click on either the Owner button to set up approver information.
Set the Owner Type field to either User or Role. If an appropriate Role does not exist, you should first go to the Approval Rules > Approver Roles menu and create it there. If User is selected a user search sub window will open for you to select the user who is to fill the approval role.
If a role, other than Requisitioner or Buy-for User, is chosen select a ‘Resolve Role by’ option. If approval is not to be determined by an account code value the ‘Buy-for user’s Approval Rule Group’ is recommended.
Optionally select a combination of five editing options for the approver in the ‘Approver can modify’ check boxes. For non-catalogue items it is recommended that the approver be able to fully edit the item: all check boxes should therefore be ticked.
Click on the Criteria button to enter the criteria for this task to be invoked.
In the Field dropdown selection box choose the value ‘Doc: Catalogue/Non-Catalogue’.
Set the Operator field to the Equal Sign (=).
Set the Value field to Non-catalogue Order.
Click the Add Rule Button to add and save this criteria combination. It will appear in the criteria box below these buttons.
Click the Update Button at the top of the screen (located just above the Plan Type field). Wait until the ‘Plan successfully updated’ confirmation box appears.
The system will prompt you if you failed to complete any mandatory fields.
Click OK. This saves your work.

Summary: This task will route all requisitions or orders (depending on the Plan Type) to the user or role selected for approval, if it contains a non-catalogue item.

Additional criteria can be added to further refine the requisitions or orders to be routed for non-catalogue approval. For example: ‘Order: Supplier name’ + ‘Contains’ + ‘Unknown’ can be added to route only non-catalogue items that have not had a supplier assigned to them.