Purchasing

Use the Purchasing application to keep electronic records of both internal and project-related procurement and receiving of services, materials, supplies, and capital items.

Your enterprise can use Purchasing whether you have a central purchasing office or perform purchasing work in many different offices.

Settings and Security Considerations

Before you can use the Purchasing application, a system administrator must specify configuration options in Settings > Purchasing & Inventory.

Purchasing security is at the menu level only.

• To enable security for Purchasing, make the purchasing application active on the Modules tab in Settings > General System.
• To specify the Purchasing menu items for a security role, use the Purchasing menu check boxes on the General Tab of Settings > Security > Roles.

To create vouchers from purchase orders, the employee's security role must have security access to Accounting > Accounts Payable > Create Voucher from PO on the General tab of Settings > Security > Roles.

Approval Process in Purchasing

You decide whether or not to use an approval process for purchase requisitions, request for price quotes, purchase orders, change orders, release orders, and inventory item requests. You create approval workflows that specify the steps, approvers, and notification alerts for an approval process in Settings > Workflow > Approval Workflows. You enable approvals individually for each Purchasing application, and you assign an approval workflow, in Settings > Purchasing & Inventory > Company Settings.

Status Codes

The status of the following items are tracked to tell you where a purchasing transaction is in its processing cycle:

• Purchase Orders
• Requisitions and Requests for Price Quote
• Line Item Orders
• Line Item Receiving

Multiple Currencies

If you use multiple currencies:

• You can create a purchase order from more than one purchase requisition and request for price quote. They must all be in the same transaction currency.
• Vantagepoint uses the functional currency of the active company to compare and apply buyers' purchasing limits and approvers' approval limits. Vantagepoint also uses the functional currency to keep the limits in the database.

Multiple Companies

If you use multiple companies:

• Each purchasing record is owned by a specific company. The list of available purchasing records displays the ones that belong to the active company.
• Firm records are available to all companies.
• Purchase requisitions and requests for price quote are available if the firm's record has accounting set up for the active company.