Purchasing: switching it on, and who can do what

Switch Purchasing on in Company settings, and choose what each role can do in it: order and receive, approve, buyer, accounts, finance or admin.

What's in this video

1. OmniSchema Purchasing looks after your company's buying: requests to buy, approvals, orders to suppliers, deliveries, and supplier bills. In this video, we'll switch it on, and decide who can do what. You switch it on in the Governance workspace, under Company settings.
2. Open the Add-ons tab, and find OmniSchema Purchasing. The price is shown here: the monthly amount, and how many supplier bills it reads for you each month.
3. Turn the switch on. We've already switched it on for Ashgrove. Everyone in your company can use it, with no charge for each person. If you ever switch it off, nothing is lost. Your records are kept, and they're all there again when you switch it back on.
4. Next, decide who can do what. You do that for each role, not for each person, so open User roles.
5. Each role now shows its Purchasing access. Each role gets one of seven choices, and picking the right one matters, so let's go through them.
6. Order and receive: ask to buy things, and mark deliveries as received. That suits engineers. Approve: the same, plus deciding the requests your spending rules can't approve by themselves.
7. Buyer looks after suppliers, the price list and the orders, and checks and approves new suppliers and their documents. Accounts deals with supplier bills. Finance approves the big requests, and sees the reports. And Purchasing admin can do everything, including the spending rules.
8. Our engineers order parts and take in deliveries, so Engineer stays on Order and receive. Our managers approve spending, so set Manager to Approve.
9. Our accounts team handles the bills, so set Accounts to Accounts, bills. Our Staff role is for office helpers who don't buy anything, so it gets No Purchasing.
10. Two things people often get wrong. First, make sure at least one role can approve. If nobody can, requests over your automatic limit just wait, with no one to decide them. Second, anyone with Governance access, like the Owner, always has full Purchasing access. You can't take that away here.
11. A change takes effect within two minutes, the next time each person opens Purchasing. Now let's open it. Go back to Company settings, and click Open Purchasing.
12. This is the Purchasing home page. The tiles show what's waiting: requests for you to approve, bills that need a look, orders out with suppliers, and deliveries due this week.
13. On the left is the menu. The pages you use every day are at the top. Under Set up are suppliers, the price list, budgets, reports, and your Purchasing settings.
14. Each person only sees what their role allows. Here's the same page for Owen, one of our engineers. He can ask to buy things, follow the orders, and take in deliveries. There are no bills, no budgets, no reports, and no company totals.
15. In the next video, we'll add our suppliers, and the price list our engineers order from.