✅ Approval Workflow
Learn how purchase approvals work on Africa Conglomerate — who can approve, how an order reaches an approver, how to approve / reject / delegate, and how to arrange cover when an approver is away. This guide matches exactly what the system does today.
- To approve orders, a member needs a company role that has the “Approve Orders” permission (see Part 1)
- Only org Owners/Admins can create roles and assign them to members
- Your company must be approved and active (see Account Setup)
How Approvals Work
When a B2B buyer submits a purchase order, it does not go straight to the seller. Its status becomes Pending Approval and an approval request is created and assigned to one of your company’s approvers. The order only proceeds once an approver approves it.
By default the workflow is single-step: one authorised approver makes the decision, and every B2B order a member submits is routed to an approver regardless of value. The order amount only sets an informational priority label (Low → Critical).
Before a member can submit, the order needs a way to be paid: the buyer must have a saved payment method, unless the company is on net terms (then the order is invoiced after approval and nothing is charged). Net-terms orders are also checked against the company's credit limit at submission and again at approval.
Organizations that need tiered sign-off can turn on multi-level approval chains, where larger orders must be approved by several people in sequence (for example Team Lead → Finance). That's an optional add-on — see Multi-Level Approval Chains below.
Each request carries a 24-hour SLA indicator so approvers can see what is due or overdue. The SLA is a visual cue only — nothing is auto-approved or auto-escalated when it lapses.
The approval lifecycle at a glance
Part 1 — Decide Who Can Approve
Approval authority is granted through roles, not a separate “approval settings” screen. Anyone whose company role has the Approve Orders permission becomes an eligible approver and starts receiving assigned requests automatically.
Create or edit a role with “Approve Orders”
As an Owner or Admin, go to the sidebar People → Roles & Permissions. Create a role (for example “Purchasing Approver”) or edit an existing one, and tick Approve Orders. Save.
Assign the role to a member
Go to People → Team Members, open the member, and change their role to the one that has Approve Orders. From that moment they appear in the approver pool and can be assigned requests.
Multi-Level Approval Chains Optional
When it's enabled for your organization, you can route orders through tiers of approvers based on order value. Each tier that an order's value reaches must sign, in order, before the order is approved. A rejection at any tier stops the whole chain. If a tier's approver is away, their Absence Cover applies to that tier automatically.
How a chain flows
Building a policy
As an Owner/Admin, open Approvals → Approval Policy and add tiers:
- Level 1 is the entry tier — it applies to every order (its threshold is fixed at 0).
- Each higher level sets an “applies at ≥” amount, in your organization's base currency. Foreign-currency orders are converted before the tiers are chosen.
- Each tier's approver is either a role (anyone holding it) or a specific person.
- Thresholds must increase level by level. When the chain is valid you can Activate the policy — until then it governs nothing.
What approvers see
A multi-level request shows a Level X of N badge in the queue and a tier checklist on the detail page — who has signed, who's next, and the amount each tier engages at. Only the current tier's approver sees the Approve / Reject buttons.
Part 2 — Arrange Cover When an Approver Is Away
When an approver will be unavailable, they set up Absence Cover so their incoming approvals are automatically routed to a colleague for a set period. This is the platform’s dated hand-off mechanism.
Set up an absence-cover period
The approver opens Approvals → Absence Cover and creates a policy with:
- Cover approver — a colleague who also has the Approve Orders permission in this organisation
- Start date and End date — the period you’ll be away
- Reason (optional)
While the period is active, any approval that would go to you is routed to your cover approver instead — no per-order action needed.
Part 3 — Review & Process Pending Approvals
Open your approval queue
In the sidebar, approvers see an Approvals section. Click Approval Queue to open your approver dashboard. It has three sections: Purchase Orders (your company’s orders awaiting approval, with Review / Approve / Reject), Sales Orders (orders from other companies that contain your products — read-only while the buyer’s approvers decide, shown as “Awaiting buyer approval”), and My Orders (orders you submitted, with Withdraw while pending). Priority and SLA appear on the request’s detail page and on the focused queue.
Open a request to review it
Click a request to open its detail page. You’ll see the full order — items, quantities, prices, the buyer, the total, the priority, the SLA countdown, and a comment thread. Use Add Comment to ask the buyer a question or leave an internal note before deciding (internal notes aren’t shown to the buyer).
Approve, Reject, or Delegate
Any approver in the company may act on a pending request (never the person who submitted it). Once a request has been delegated, only the approver it was handed to can act. Choose one:
- Approve — add an optional note and click Confirm Approval. Stock is reserved in the seller’s warehouse and the order proceeds to payment (or, on net terms, is invoiced) and then to Awaiting Dispatch. If a tracked item has no stock record the approval is refused with “Cannot approve: No inventory record found for …”.
- Reject — a reason is required (a short sentence of at least 10 characters). The order is rejected and the buyer is notified with your reason.
- Delegate — on the request’s detail page, hand this one request to another approver in your company with an optional note. You can’t delegate to the person who placed the order, to someone from another company, or to an approver who is currently on absence cover. The request then shows “Delegated to you” in their queue.
Buyers have one more action of their own: while an order is still pending they can Withdraw it (from the request’s detail page, or from the My Orders section of the Approval Queue), which cancels the order.
/hub/approvals/queue/) lets you tick several requests and
Bulk Approve or Bulk Reject them after a
confirmation preview.
The buyer is notified
After you act, the buyer is notified in-app and by email (subject to their notification preferences):
- Approved — the order moves forward to payment and fulfillment: the buyer’s default saved method is charged (mobile money waits for the buyer to confirm on their phone), or a net-terms buyer is simply invoiced. If the charge fails the order shows Payment Failed and the buyer can pick another saved method with Retry Payment on the order page.
- Rejected — the buyer sees your reason on the order.
- Delegated — both you and the new approver are notified.
Part 4 — History & Analytics
Review past decisions
Open Approvals → History (your role also needs the View Financials permission) to see completed approval requests and their outcomes, filterable by Approved / Rejected and date. Each request also has a Timeline on its detail page showing the key events (created, delegated, approved/rejected) with who acted and when.
If your plan includes analytics, an Approvals → Analytics dashboard shows volume, velocity, and bottlenecks across your approvers.