Purchasing & Supplylifecycle
Purchase Requests & Approvals
How do teams request materials and get purchases approved?
A purchase request records who is asking, what for, and why — line by line, with a written justification. Each line carries an approval decision and an approved quantity, and lines already on the shelf can reserve existing stock instead of triggering a purchase.
The sequence
4 stepsRaise
The requester creates the request with detail lines and a written justification.
Check stock
Each line records whether the item is already available; available lines reserve existing stock.
Approve
The approval decision is recorded with an approved quantity per line.
Order
The remaining quantity-to-purchase becomes order lines that reference the request lines.
How it works
A request is a record with a requester, a justification, and detail lines that name the item and quantity needed. The approver records a decision per request together with an approved quantity on each line, and the approved amount can differ from what was asked for — the record keeps both.
Before anything is bought, each line records whether the item is already in stock. In-stock lines create a reservation against current inventory, and only the remaining quantity-to-purchase moves forward to ordering. That stock check is built into the request record itself, not a separate lookup someone may forget.
Approved lines flow into order lines, and each order line keeps a reference to the request line it fulfills. When the goods are eventually accepted and hit the stock ledger, the whole path back to the original request is preserved as record references.
Worth knowing
- Line-level approved quantitiesThe approved quantity is stored per line and can differ from the requested quantity — both stay on the record.
- Stock-aware requestingEach line records whether the item is in stock; in-stock lines reserve existing inventory instead of generating a purchase.
- Written justificationThe justification is a field on the request record, so the reason for the spend is part of the audit trail.
- Traceable into ordersOrder lines reference the request lines they fulfill, keeping the request-to-receipt path intact.
See purchase requests & approvals running in continON.
A guided walkthrough on a sanitized demo tenant — this capability inside its module, on the shared platform.