PO Collaboration with Buyers

It's important to stay in close collaboration with your customers, especially where supply chains are concerned. If your customers use PO Collaboration, they specify whether you must approve orders at the header or line level. This process allows you to confirm orders containing quantity, amount, or service-based lines.

You can use PO Collaboration messaging to stay in contact with your supplier to reduce the lag time between order receipt and fulfillment, while mitigating risks and potential supply gaps faster and more easily.

PO Collaboration flow

When you receive a notification about a new PO Collaboration order, you can view the order and open it to see more details. You can also see a banner on the order that lets you know the order status. You can select Take me there to see more information about the order confirmation.

Within each confirmation page, the Lines table includes a Type column to distinguish between the different types of lines you need to confirm.

When you review the order, you can either accept, reject, or propose changes to the lines. For service-based lines, you can also propose changes to service-specific details like the Service Start Date, Due Date, and Service Manager Email. If you reject a line, you must specify a reason and leave a comment, if desired.

Your customer can specify whether they want you to approve or reject orders at the header level (act on all lines at once) or at the line level (act on each line individually). You can see this information below the purchase order number when reviewing an order.

Once you accept all lines in an order at the header or line level you can submit the order. You can't submit until you have accepted or rejected all lines in an order. You can use banner at the top of the order to check the order confirmation status.

Confirmation Levels

Your customer can specify whether they want you to approve or reject orders at the header level (act on all lines at once) or at the line level (act on each line individually). You can see this information below the purchase order number when reviewing an order.

Header-Level Confirmation

If your customer requires header-level confirmation, you must either accept or reject the entire PO.

  • Header Approve: If you accept the PO at the header level, you are accepting all the lines within that PO.
  • Header Reject: If you reject the PO at the header level, you are rejecting all the lines within that PO. After you send the rejection, Coupa will send you an acknowledgment message confirming the transmission was successful. Your customer will then need to review the rejection.
Note: If the PO is set up for header-level approvals, you cannot attempt to send line-level approvals. Doing so will result in a cXML error.
Line-Level Confirmation

If your customer requires line-level approvals, you must approve, reject, or propose a change for each individual line in the PO.

When you propose a change, the ConfirmationStatus is updated accordingly, and the change is sent to your customer for review.

Comments in PO Collaboration

You can have contextual conversations with your customers by using order comments. When you select the comment icon, you can leave both line and header level comments on your order confirmations.

To review comments, go to the Lines section and select the comment icons with red notification bubbles on them. You can see the comments left for you or reply to them.

You can use the New unread comments filter on the Order Confirmations page to see orders with comments pending your reply.

Order Confirmations table

You can go to Orders > Order Confirmations to view your order confirmations.

You can load and export confirmations from this table. For more information, see Confirm Supply Chain Collaboration Orders with CSV.

Track order confirmation changes

On each confirmation page, a expandable History section allows to see how confirmations evolved, identify who made specific changes, and maintain accountability across your collaborative processes.

Permissions

Only users with the Order Line Confirmation permission can confirm orders. For more information, see Manage Users.