3328871 - Purchase Order Approval task is Not Automatically Approved when Buyer Responsible and Approver is same person

You have created a purchase order where approval is triggered based on cost center related approval rule to cost center manager who is also Buyer Responsible for the order.

You expected the task to be automatically approved as it is for same person and self approval is scoped but the task remains unassigned and pending. You need to manually assign the task and complete the approval.

SAP Business ByDesign

1. Go to Purchase Requests and Orders work center
2. Select view Purchase Orders
3. The buyer responsible is A and Purchase order is assigned to cost center, where cost center manager is also A (A refers to both cost center manager and buyer responsible)
4. Navigate to Approvals tab
5. The task is pending and unassigned

Here the buyer responsible of the purchase order is the cost center manager and based on the approval rule, he/she is responsible to approve the order. But the task is unassigned because system cannot assign the task to the person who is both approver and buyer responsible.

Note: If the Creator, Requestor, or Recipient / Buyer Responsible and the approver are same, then these users are filtered out from the list of approvers. (e.g.If Manager is creating a shopping cart / purchase order on behalf of employee)

The task will not be auto approved because:

1. You have scoped self-approval. Self-Approval for Purchase Orders means that system will send task to approver only when he/she is direct approver, in this case, user (buyer responsible) would have got it if he/she was a direct approver and should approve the task. It only works for "Direct Approvers" scenario and will not bypass approval.
2. You have also set this Business Configuration activity:Purchasing: Purchase Request and Order Management: Purchase Orders: Purchase Order Approvals: "If you want that the buyer responsible or creator should not receive the approval task for purchase order and purchase order items", you have selected the respective checkboxes, hence the respective person will not get the task even if he/she is determined as approver.

You are expecting the task to be automatically approved. In this case, you need to set "Automatic Approval" checkbox in the approval rule for purchase order.

With this checkbox, system will bypass the approval task if both buyer responsible and cost center manager is the same person who is determined as approver.

Note:

If the Automatic Approval checkbox is selected, no approval task is created and the purchasing document will be processed.

If the Automatic Approval checkbox is not selected, then an Unassigned Task is created in such cases.

automatic approval, self approval, purchase order approval task unassigned, buyer responsible, cost center manager, approval by cost assignment , KBA , automatic approval , approval by cost assignment , buyer responsible , self approval , all cost center approvers by value limit , approval task unassigned , purchase order approval , AP-POP-PO , Purchase Order , Problem