Viewing and Responding to Approval Notifications

Use the Notification Details Web page, accessible through the Notifications Summary menu in Purchasing, to manage your pending approval queue and take approval actions. After opening a notification, you can also submit a document for approval from the notification if you didn't yet do it through the Approve Document window.

Purchasing offers the following document approval actions in the notification: Approve, Approve and Forward, Forward, and Reject. You can also reassign a notification to somebody else.

The profile option PO: Allow PO Approval Forward Action enables users to display or hide the Forwardand Approve and Forward buttons in the approval notification. When the value of the profile option is Yes, these two buttons are displayed. When the value of the profile option is No, these two buttons are not visible in the notification. The following buttons are displayed:

For more information on the profile options, see: Profile Option Category and Profile Options Descriptions , in the Profile Options appendix.

The approval amount noted in the notification includes nonrecoverable tax if you use tax and recovery rates. See: Tax Information in Purchasing.

The approval notification displays the header level attachments (View Document Attachments link) to the approvers. The Purchase order approval workflow has an attribute Display Attachments to control displaying of attachments in the approval notification. Setting the attribute to Yes will display the link View Document Attachments in the approval notification and all the header level attachments of the Purchase order in the approval notification. When Display attachments attribute is set to No, the approval notification will not display the header attachments.

An approver may be interested in viewing the charge account before approving the order document to understand the likely impact to the departmental budgets. The notification also shows the charge account at the line level for the approver. If there are multiple charge accounts for distributions, the link called Multiple shows in the lines region.

The Notifications Web page requires Oracle Workflow to be set up. See: Setting Up Oracle Workflow.

Reassign and Forward A Reassign action is not recorded in the Action History window, but a Forward action is. See: Viewing Action History. To reassign a notification but still record you as the approver, choose Reassign, and then choose Transfer. To forward the notification so that the new approver is recorded in the action history instead of you, open the notification and select the Forward action. (Do not use the Reassign/Transfer option.)
Ignore Some reminder notifications include a response of Ignore. Ignore means that you are ignoring the notification for now. Purchasing will not display that notification again until the concurrent program process Send Notifications for Purchasing Documents runs. (See: Send Notifications for Purchasing Documents.)
Close Button When you click Close, Purchasing considers the notification closed. If you want to see the notification again, choose Search and select a status of All or Closed.
Opening a Document From a notification that you have opened, you can also drill down to the document and modify it if Approver Can Modify is enabled for the document type. See: Defining Document Types. Depending on the function security assigned to your responsibility, you have varying levels of access to information. A responsibility defines an application user's current privileges while working with Oracle Applications.

Important: After you modify a document opened through the notification, you must return to the notification and choose Approve there, not in the document itself, so that Purchasing can record your approval action and continue with or complete the approval process.

Purchasing Notifications

In the Notifications Summary list, notifications for the following Purchasing documents appear. The Send Notifications for Purchasing Documents process must be running for some of these notifications to be sent:

For notifications about purchase order acceptances, RFQ expiration, and quotation expiration, you can choose a response of Close. The closed notification won't reappear unless you change the expiration date on the document.

If you receive a notification titled Document Manager Failed:

Open the notification and read the detailed message. You or your system administrator may need to reactivate the PO Document Approval Manager. Once the PO Document Approval Manager is reactivated, respond to the notification by choosing Retry.

Important: After the PO Document Approval Manager is reactivated, you must respond to the notification with Retry to restart the approval process where it left off.

If you receive a notification titled Unable to Reserve Document:

You have several options:

If you see Resubmit Requisition, Update Requisition, and Requisition Detail icons in a notification:

These icons enable you to resubmit, update, or view requisitions only if iProcurement is installed.

Profile Options for Notifications

The following profile options are used to notify requesters when a purchase order is created from the requisition and when an autocreated purchase order is approved:

For more information on the profile options, please refer to the Profile Option Category and Profile Options Descriptions section in the Profile Options appendix.

Additional Information

For more detailed instructions on how to use the Notifications Summary Web page, including the Worklist and Find Notifications pages accessible in the Workflow menu in Purchasing, see:To View Notifications from the Worklist, and To Find Notifications.

You can also view and respond to notifications through e-mail. Oracle Applications uses Oracle Workflow technology to route notifications through e-mail. This way, an approver who has easier access to e-mail than to the Purchasing application can view notifications and take approval actions. See: Reviewing Notifications via Electronic Mail.

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