How purchase order approvals work - Pacten Guides

2026-09-21

Without a route, any one person who can approve purchase orders can approve any order, at any value. A route replaces that single check with an order of who is asked — and lets the value of the order decide how far it travels.

You will find it under Supply → Settings → Approvals.

THE TWO PIECES

Levels, and rules

Everything on that screen is one of these two.

A level is a group of people. One of them approving is enough to clear it.
A rule decides what happens when a level approves — and that is where the value comes in.

CHOOSING WHO

Seven options, in the order you will usually want them

The list is ordered by how often each is the right answer.

Pick people is the simplest place to start: name them yourself, and save the set as a group if you will use it again. A saved group and whoever is allowed to approve come next, and are the ones worth moving to once more than one route needs the same people.

The option to avoid in Supply

“The requester’s own manager” is in the list, but Supply has no reporting lines for it to read, so it finds nobody. An order that reaches a level nobody can fill stops there. It is recoverable — anyone who can edit these routes can release the order past that level, and the order itself says why it is stuck — but it is a stall worth not creating. The same is true in Delivery. In People and Documents it works, because those do keep a reporting line.

LETTING THE VALUE DECIDE

What a rule actually does

It forks the route, rather than switching a level on and off.

Put a value on a level’s rule and approving it does one of two things. Under that figure, approving finishes the order. At or above it, approving passes the order on to another level. That is how “anything over two million also needs the MD” is expressed — not by switching the MD’s level on, but by sending larger orders to it when the first level says yes.

BEFORE YOU TRUST IT

Try it with a real figure

The panel beside the route answers the only question that matters.

Type an order value into Try it and it shows who would be asked, in order. Try one below your figure and one above it. It costs nothing to get wrong there, and quite a lot to get wrong on a real order.

Nothing is live until you press Save. Orders already waiting keep the route they were raised against — a copy is taken at the time — so saving changes what happens next, and leaves what is already in flight alone.