How many times have you heard finance teams complain about their lack of visibility over committed spend? Or about receiving unexpected invoices for spending that hasn’t gone through a formal approval process?
Purchase requests intend to address these issues by creating a formal and transparent process in Moss to ensure that all invoice spend can be approved before being committed, preventing last minute surprises for controllers and financial planners.
Note: You can only place purchase requests for invoice purchases. You cannot request purchase requests for payments done with a card. If you are planning to make a purchase with a card, you can request a card in Moss and give the reason for the request.
The purchase request flow comprises 5 easy steps ⬇️
The lifecycle of a purchase request
Submitting a purchase request.
As a first step, a purchase request needs to be submitted.
Whenever employees identify the need to purchase goods or services and know the supplier that they wish to work with, they can log in to Moss and easily request approval before proceeding with their purchase.
Approving, rejecting or challenging a purchase request.
Once the purchase request is submitted, it will be sent to the relevant approver using the existing approval policies for invoice spend.
Before this purchase is committed with the supplier, the relevant approver(s) will have the opportunity to review it and formally approve, reject, or challenge it if further details are needed.
Uploading an invoice
Once the purchased goods or services have been delivered, the corresponding invoice received from the supplier needs to be uploaded to Moss. This can be done either manually or by forwarding it to your invoice inbox, to ensure that the relevant payment takes place.
Matching an invoice to a purchase request
Upon uploading the invoice, Moss will attempt to automatically match it with the corresponding purchase request based on a series of common fields between the two documents.
Invoice approval of purchase requests (optional step)
As soon as the invoice details are confirmed during the accounting review, and the invoice has been matched to the corresponding purchase request, Moss will check for discrepancies between the two to determine the optimal approval flow.
Closing a purchase request
After successfully matching a purchase request with an invoice, and confirming that no additional invoices are anticipated for that particular purchase, the purchase request can be closed.
Additional information:
Purchase requests involving new suppliers
Whenever spenders submit a purchase request, they have to indicate the supplier they wish to work with. If they intend to work with a new supplier, rather than selecting an existing one, they can manually enter it in the supplier field of the purchase request.
However, this new supplier will not be created as an actual supplier in Moss. Why? Because supplier management is the responsibility of the finance team. As a result, the new supplier will need to be created by the finance team when the first invoice is submitted.
The status a purchase request can have
The purchase request approval status, visible both in purchase request tables as well as side-panels, allows you to track the progress of your organization’s purchase requests throughout their life cycle, from creation to closure.
Draft: PR created but not yet submitted.
Pending approval: PR submitted and waiting for approval.
Withdrawn: PR withdrawn by the submitter while Pending approval - end state.
Approved: PR authorized by the relevant approver(s).
Rejected: PR declined by the relevant approver(s).
Challenged: PR sent by the approver back to the submitter in order to obtain more details.
Closed: PR closed - end state.
In addition, once a purchase request is approved, the Spend status allow you to track the delivery of goods and services and the matching process of your purchase request to the relevant invoice:
Pending delivery: Goods or services not delivered yet and waiting for the relevant invoice.
Late invoice: Goods or services delivered, yet still waiting for invoice.
Invoiced: Goods or services delivered and invoice matched to purchase request.
