How do purchasing unit responsibilities affect approval flows?

Purchasing unit responsibilities affect approval flows as follows:

• For each group listed in ResponsibleUser.csv, the Ariba system generates a subgroup that contains only the users with responsibility for that purchasing unit.
• Users without purchasing unit responsibilities are not added to the approval flow of approvable documents for a given purchasing unit if a responsible user exists for that purchasing unit.
• After the addition of an approval group to an approval flow (for example, the Invoice Manager group), the approval process checks to see if any of the users who belong to that group have responsibility for the purchasing unit associated with the approvable.
  
  If it finds responsible users, it replaces the group in the approval flow by a subgroup that includes only the users with responsibility for the purchasing unit listed in the approvable.
  
  However, when an approvable is set up to have group approval and there are no users in the ResponsibleUser.csv file (Import Responsible User Assignments task) for that group and purchasing unit combination from the approvable:
  
  • If the purchasing unit visibility control parameter is enabled, the system checks if there are any responsible users for the parent purchasing unit for that group. It keeps checking up the purchasing unit hierarchy until responsible users are found, ending with a check for members of the approval group who are responsible for the All purchasing unit. If there are still no active group members responsible for the top-level purchasing unit, the Customer Administrator is added to approve.
  • If the purchasing unit visibility control parameter is not enabled, the approval request is sent to all members of the approval group.

On the approval flow diagram, an approval subgroup appears with the same name as the original group. However, when you click the group name, the details of the group include an additional field named Context that shows the purchasing unit associated with the private group, as in the following figure:

Note: When the approval flow includes the requester’s supervisor, the supervisor is added regardless of whether the requester and supervisor belong to the same purchasing unit.

The purchasing unit hierarchy does not affect on which approvables a user can take action (for example, which approvables they can approve or deny). In other words, users who can act on approvables from one purchasing unit cannot necessarily act on approvables from a child or parent of that purchasing unit unless they are specifically responsible for the child or parent purchasing unit.

Important: If your purchasing unit setup includes the responsible user capability, keep the following in mind: A user with no explicit purchasing unit responsibilities is not added to the approval flow of approvables from a given purchasing unit if the approval group includes a responsible user for that purchasing unit. This is true regardless of to which purchasing unit the user belongs.

Core Procurement > Core Administration > Approval Flows
Core Procurement > Core Administration > Approver lookups
Core Procurement > Core Administration > Purchasing units import
Invoicing