Order Approval can be managed at the user, department, or cost center level. This article describes the difference between using departments and cost centers when managing budgets for more than one user. For an article about user budget settings, click here.
Compare Department and Cost Center for controlling Approval Budgets
We recommend Cost Center for most use cases but here is a comparison of the two methods:
| Department | Cost Center |
Visible on Storefront | Yes, but not in the cart — the storefront user can't see the department they are in from the cart but they can in the My Account screen. | Yes — the storefront user can see cost centers in the cart. |
Set per Line Item | No — the entire order will always be set to the department of the user. | Yes — the storefront user can set cost center by line item or for all lines. |
Required | Yes — orders will always be set to the department of the storefront user. | Configurable — you can require cost centers for all orders and line items or make it optional. |
More than One Per Order | No — only one department can be set to a storefront user, this is used on every order | Yes — a user with more than one cost center can set cost center per line item. |
Displays in Order History | No — by default it does not show unless an ERP integration brings this information into the order. | Yes — shows on a line item level. |
Set a budget to require Approval | Yes — the budget is set for the whole department. All user orders of the same department are counted and once the budget is reached the orders will go for approval. | Yes — the budget is set for a cost center. All line items of all orders of the same cost center are counted and once the budget is reached the orders will go for approval that items in the cost center. |
Setting Up Department Budget Approvals
The following steps are required to setup order approval by department budgets.
Create a Department and assign a budget to it.
Assign approvers
Note: you can assign approvers at the Department or User level. If you do both then all approvers at both levels will receive the email and the first one to approve or reject the order will be respected.
Assign an approver to the Department (Skip this if you only want to control approver list at the user level.)
Assign a new or existing user to that department. (Skip this if you only want to control the approver list at the Department level)
Assign Users to the Department
Note: you can use the department or user edit screen to assign a user to the department.