Microsoft Dynamics 365 | 1099 Vendor Approval Workflows in Business Central (Demo)

I want to show you two approval workflows that you can use in Business Central for the vendor record. We’re going to look at a workflow that you fire off when you create a vendor. We’re also going to look at a workflow that monitors the 1099 vendor field, and we’ll look at the approval process from that point on. So let’s get started.

Adding a New Vendor

I’m logged in as an accounting person in my organization here. I’m adding a new vendor. So let’s go ahead and add that vendor. I’ve entered the vendor data, and now what I want to do is I want to request approval for this.

Initiating Approval Request

I’m going to go up here, send an approval request. At any time, we can look at the approvals and the status of the approvals for a specific vendor by going to vendor and then approvals. We can see that it created approvals for two individuals.

Approval Process

The first one is Alan. The second one is the admin person here. If we look at Alan’s role center, we can see that he has one request to approve. Let’s open that up.

Reviewing and Approving Vendor

Here’s the request right here. We can open the record and we can see which vendor is going to be added to the vendor master file. If we’re fine with this, we’ll go ahead and approve it. I can approve it right here. And it will go on to the next approver, which is the admin person.

Admin’s Approval

Here’s the admin person’s role center. He’s got one request to approve. This is the one that Alan just approved. What he can do is he can open this record, but he can also approve it right from here, reject it, or delegate it to another. He can even add comments. But I’m just going to go ahead and approve this.

Workflow Configuration

And that’s the first vendor approval workflow. Let’s take a look at the approval process that was set up for this particular approval.

Monitoring the 1099 Vendor Field

Adding 1099 Information

These are the workflows that I currently have in my system running. This is the one that we just activated. Let’s open this up. If I scroll down here, I can see that these are the steps that will take place when an approval is requested for a particular vendor.

Approval User Group

Let’s take a look at the approval step. We can see that for this workflow, I’m going to use a workflow user group, and the workflow user group is called vendor.

User Group Details

Let’s take a look at that. This is the workflow user group called vendor that I used in the workflow we just completed. And you can see that it specifies particular users in a specific order. Allen’s the first one, the admin person is the second one.

Workflow Status

So I’m logged back in as David. David was the user that created the vendor record. Let’s take a look at the approvals. We can see that the current status for both approvers is now set at approved, which means that this vendor is ready to use.

Updating Vendor Record

But let’s say it turns out that this particular vendor is also a 1099 vendor. You want to add that information to the record.

1099 Code Addition

I’m going to scroll down to the payments quick tab, and here I’m going to specify the 1099 code for this particular vendor. It’s NEC01. We’ll put in an IRS code right here, and that’s it. This record has been updated, but also there’s a new approval record that was created.

New Approval Request

This approval entry here was created because I changed the status of the 1099 field. You can see it’s an open status record, and the approver is Alicia.

Alicia’s Approval

So I’m logged in as Alicia now, and we can look at her approvals. She is on this approval workflow to ensure that the organization has the documents they need to satisfy the IRS. If she has the documents she needs, she can go ahead and approve this, or she can hold on it or she can reject it and add a comment. Let’s just go ahead and approve it, and now the vendor is approved. I can use this vendor for payables, for purchases, and to write checks.

Summary of Vendor Approval Workflows

Let’s take a quick look at the 1099 vendor approval workflow. Here I was specifying a specific field on the vendor record that I was monitoring. When that changed, it automatically created the approval request.

Let’s take a look at the approvers. So here I’m using a specific approver. This is a specific user. All the approval requests created by the system for this workflow will go to Alicia. So that’s a quick look at two vendor approval workflows. We looked at a workflow that we used when we created a vendor. We looked at a second workflow that was automatically activated when the 1099 field on an existing vendor record was changed, and we went through the approval process and the different ways that you can set that up in Business Central.