Zoho Inventory

Transaction Approval

The Transaction Approval feature allows you to verify and approve transactions which your users create in Zoho Inventory before they reflect in your accounts and reports. This process helps in identifying mistakes and preventing needless losses to the company. In Zoho Inventory, you can set up approval workflow for sales transactions, purchase transactions, stock adjustments and transfer orders. Let’s understand this better with a scenario.

Scenario: James is a business owner and has employees working for him in various departments. A newly appointed staff in the purchase department accidentally sent out a purchase order with the wrong product. James finds out about this and wonders how he could have prevented it in the first place. Immediately, he sets up an approval workflow to ensure that all purchase orders are approved by the respective managers before they’re sent out.


Enable Transaction Approval

If you require approval workflow for your organization, you can enable it under preferences.

To enable approval: 

  1. Go to Settings, Preferences, then Approvals.
  2. Go to the Sales Approval, Purchase Approval, or Inventory Approval tab.
  3. Click on the Enable button to activate approval workflow for the respective module.
Enable Sales Approval button

Note: If you have an integrated Zoho Books account, you will have to enable this feature through your Zoho Books organization.


Add Approvers

Admins can approve all transactions by default. They can also extend the privilege to other users.

To provide approval permission for a user:

Step - 1 : Create a role

new-role

more-permissions

Step - 2 : Invite new users

Once you have enabled permissions, you can invite new users to the organization as approvers. To invite new users:

Pro Tip: You can also turn existing users into approvers. To do so, go to the Users tab > click the Gear icon next to the user > click Edit and then assign a role with approval permission.

Learn more about Users and Roles.


Approval Preferences

Once you have enabled approval, you can configure your approval preferences. This will help you to restrict and define the role you would like to offer your approvers.

Pro Tip: Click the Show Approvers option to view the list of all the users who have the permission to approve or reject the transactions. You can contact the Admin of your Zoho Inventory organization to get approval access.

Configure Approvers

Multilevel Approval

You can also set up a multi-level approval process for the transactions that should be verified two or more approvers before they’re finally approved and sent to the intended recipient. To set up an approval hierarchy for your organization:

  1. Go to Settings, Preferences, then Approval.
  2. Click the Sales Approval, Purchase Approval or Inventory Approval tab.
  3. Choose the Configure multi-level approval with specific approvers option.
  4. Select the approvers from the drop-down.
  5. Click + Add New Level to add more approvers, if needed. Note: You can only add up to 10 approvers.
  6. Click Save at the bottom of the page.
Add multilevel approvers

Any transaction created henceforth must be verified and approved by approvers of all levels to proceed further. A transaction becomes invalid if any one of them rejects it.

Insight: In multi-level approval, the Level 1 approver will be notified first. If the transaction passes their approval, the next approver in line (Level 2) will receive an email and in-app notification to verify the transaction. Likewise, all the subsequent approvers who are a part of the multi-level approval process will be notified when it’s their turn.


Notification Preferences

Select the notification preferences for your approvers and submitters

Notification preferences
Next >

Transaction Approval Process

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