Approvals

Seloria enforces approval controls at the points where money is committed: when an award is decided, when a purchase order is sent, when a budget is activated, when spend has no budget behind it, and when a supplier invoice is cleared for payment. Each control is driven by a threshold your organization sets — first in the onboarding wizard, and at any time afterwards in Settings (thresholds are editable by PM and Admin).

​

Who can approve

Approval authority is derived from who is actually on your team, not from a setting you have to remember to flip:

• Procurement Managers (PM) who are active are the eligible approvers.
• If the organization has no active PM, the owner/admin becomes the approver automatically. This is a fallback, not a mode: a brand-new account, or one whose only PM left, never ends up with nobody able to approve.
• Buyers and Requestors can never approve. They only see the approval requests they themselves opened, so they can track status without seeing the org-wide queue.

​

Separation of duties tightens itself

You cannot approve what you created — but only when someone else can. If you are the only eligible approver, Seloria lets you resolve your own item and records it as a deliberate self-approval in the audit trail, so the work never deadlocks. The moment a second approver exists, the block switches on by itself. Nothing to configure: governance gets stricter as the team grows. When rejecting, a comment or reason is required; when approving, it is optional. Every decision is recorded in the entity’s audit history and the requester is notified in-app and by email.

​

PO approval threshold

Set the Purchase order approval threshold in the wizard or in Settings. The rule:

• If the threshold is greater than 0 and a PO’s total exceeds it, the PO cannot be sent to the supplier until a PM approves it. The approval request is opened automatically the first time someone tries to send, and the approvers are notified with a one-click link to decide from the email.
• A threshold of 0 means no PO approval is required — every PO can be sent directly.

Once approved, the buyer can send the PO normally. If rejected, sending stays blocked and the rejection (with the approver’s comment) is shown on the PO. This gate is independent from the award approval: re-awards can produce several POs that each sit under the award threshold, so the spend is checked again at the moment of issue. A buyer can also voluntarily click Request approval on any draft PO that has no approval yet — useful when policy or judgment calls for a second pair of eyes even under the threshold.

​

Award approval

Set the Award approval threshold the same way. When a buyer awards an RFQ (or RFP) and the total awarded amount exceeds the threshold:

• The RFQ stays in its current status and shows an award pending approval banner.
• Generating POs is blocked until a PM decides.
• On approve, the RFQ advances to Awarded and the buyer is notified that POs can be generated.
• On reject (reason required), the award is undone entirely: supplier quotes return to submitted, any budget reservation is released, and the buyer can fix and re-award.

A threshold of 0 means awards never require approval and are confirmed immediately.

​

Unbudgeted spend threshold

The Unbudgeted spend threshold is a separate control for awards that have no linked budget:

• Left empty, the control is off.
• Set to 0, any unbudgeted award requires approval.
• Set to an amount, unbudgeted awards above that amount require approval.

This catches spend that would otherwise bypass budget tracking, regardless of the award threshold.

​

Budget approvals

Budgets follow their own activation flow:

• Budgets are always created as drafts and must be submitted for activation.
• The Auto-activation threshold decides what happens on submit: budgets at or below the threshold activate automatically; budgets above it go to pending approval. Left empty (or 0), every budget requires approval.
• Approving, rejecting, or closing a budget is reserved for the approvers described above. Buyers can create and submit drafts but never activate them.
• When a budget goes to pending approval, its approvers are notified with a one-click link (see Approving straight from the email).

​

Invoice approvals

Supplier invoices are approved by the same authority as everything else — active PMs, falling back to the owner/admin — and follow two extra rules of their own:

• You cannot approve an invoice you registered or last edited, even when other approvals would allow self-approval.
• An invoice sitting in exception can be approved, but only with a written override reason, which is stored with your name and the timestamp.

The full flow, including the checks that produce an exception, is in Three-way match.

​

Small team mode

During onboarding you choose between a small team and a hierarchical team. The choice tailors your setup — most visibly the getting-started checklist, which doesn’t push a one-person operation to invite colleagues it doesn’t have.

​

Approval chain by amount (bands)

A single threshold answers “does this need approval?” but not “how many people, and in what order?”. For that, Settings → Approvals lets you define bands by amount, which build a sequential chain. Bands are cumulative: every band whose floor the amount crosses adds one approver, and they are asked in order. With bands at 15k, 100k and 500k, an award of 600,000 needs three approvals, one after another — not just the top one. The next approver is only notified once the previous step is approved. Each band’s approver is either:

• A role — anyone holding that role (PM or Admin) can resolve the step, or
• A named person — only that person, which is how you put a GM or MD on the highest band.

Three templates give you a starting point, and you can edit the bands afterwards: Bands and the dimension rules (by project or department) work together, not instead of each other: an award can require the PM because of its amount and a specific approver because of the project it belongs to. Both steps must clear. Bands apply to awards in this version. If no bands are defined, awards fall back to the classic Award approval threshold described above.

​

Delegating approval authority

When an approver goes on leave, approvals should not stall behind them. Settings → Approvals → Delegation hands your authority to someone else for a defined window. How it behaves:

• Who can delegate — PMs and Admins. By default you delegate your own authority; an Admin can also create a delegation on behalf of someone else who forgot to set one up.
• A window, not a switch — you pick an end date, and the delegation only applies between its start and end. Outside that window it has no effect, so authority returns on its own when you are back.
• An optional cap — set a maximum amount and the delegate can only resolve steps at or below it. Anything larger waits for you. Leave it empty for no limit.
• It applies to named approvers — a step assigned to a specific person is the case that needs delegation. A step defined by role can already be resolved by anyone holding that role, so it never blocks.
• The record keeps both names — the audit trail stores who approved on behalf of whom. The delegate’s decision is never anonymous, and the original approver stays accountable.
• You cannot delegate to yourself, and the delegate must be an active user.
• Revoking takes effect immediately; existing approvals already decided are untouched.

Delegation does not bypass the segregation-of-duties rule: a delegate still cannot approve something they themselves created.

​

Approving straight from the email

Every approval can be decided from the email, without signing in: awards (RFQ and RFP), purchase orders, budgets and supplier invoices. When a step opens, each eligible approver gets a notification email with a personal one-click link, in their own language. The link opens a single page, the same for every type, built to read on a phone:

• What and how much — the type, the reference and the amount, large.
• The context to decide — supplier, project, budget and what is still available in it, savings against the budget on awards, the payment milestone and the three-way match result on invoices, and who is asking.
• The line items, folded so the page stays short, and the PDF where there is one (the purchase order itself, or the bid comparison of an RFQ award).
• An optional comment, kept in the history next to the decision.
• Approve and Reject, always visible at the bottom.

The rules are exactly the ones that apply inside the app — the link only saves the sign-in:

• Authority comes from the roster, and you still cannot approve what you created while someone else can.
• Rejecting needs a reason on awards and budgets, as in the app; on purchase orders and invoices it is optional.
• An invoice in exception can only be approved with a written override reason, typed on the same page.
• The decision is recorded in the audit history as taken via email, with the time, IP address and device.

The link is a credential, so it is deliberately narrow:

• Single use, and it expires after 7 days.
• Pinned to the amount at the time it was sent. If the award, purchase order, budget or invoice changes amount, the link no longer applies and the page sends you to Seloria.
• One link per approver, so the decision is still attributed to a person. The first to act resolves the step; the others go stale.
• Not forwarded to delegates — whoever covers your work while you are away does not receive your link. Approval delegates get their own.
• Re-awarding an RFQ invalidates every outstanding link for it.

​

Where approvers act

• The Approvals page (sidebar: Requisitions → Approvals) is the PM workspace. It shows counters and tabs for intakes to assign, RFQs to approve, and POs to approve, each with one-click Approve / Reject actions and a comment dialog.
• Entity detail pages — award approvals are decided directly from the award banner on the RFQ detail page, PO approvals from the banner on the PO detail page, and budget approvals from the budget detail page.
• The dashboard shows PMs and Admins a banner with the number of pending approvals and a shortcut to the queue.
• Notifications and email — approvers are notified in-app and by email when something needs their decision, with a one-click link to decide from the email; requesters are notified of the outcome the same way.