What changed
- Purchase orders can be recalled, edited and resent instead of being recreated
- Approvals happen by email and on mobile, so they no longer stall on availability
- Budget utilisation is visible live, with sub-budget filtering, rather than at period end
Zoho Creator
Where they started
The procure-to-pay cycle existed — purchase requisition, RFQ, purchase order, GRN or service bill, payment, with three approval levels. What it lacked was control and visibility. A purchase order with an error had to be recreated. Approvers could not see the invoice they were approving against. Quotation rules were applied inconsistently. Budget consumption was not visible until after the fact, and offline payments such as rent and utilities lived outside the system entirely.
What we built
We extended their existing Zoho Creator procurement application rather than replacing it. The work fell into five areas.
- Purchase orders
- Recall, edit and resend, so a mistake is corrected rather than the order recreated. A working PO document button, automated PDFs for pending requisitions before RFQ, and print from both the requisition and order timelines.
- Approvals and compliance
- Invoice visibility at all three approval levels. A single-quotation waiver for agreement items, with the three-quotation rule kept everywhere else. Sequential approvals, quotation routing, and approval by email or from the mobile app.
- Notifications
- Email and in-app alerts on every approval action, with reminders before a deadline rather than after it.
- Masters
- Open product and vendor access for everyone procuring, with GST verification built into the vendor record.
- Payments and reporting
- An offline payment module routed through a finance approval chain, a manager dashboard with date filters, a budget chart filterable by sub-budget, and requisition, order and payment reports.