Purchase Requisition Process: Steps, Approval, and Workflow
Jul 10, 2026
Jul 10, 2026
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A purchase requisition is an internal request to buy something, raised by an employee and approved before any money is committed. The purchase requisition process runs in five steps: an employee submits the requisition, a manager reviews the need and the budget, finance or procurement approves it, the approved requisition becomes a purchase order sent to the supplier, and the requisition is closed once the goods or the invoice arrive. It is the control step that happens before the purchase order, not after.
Last updated July 2026.
The requisition is where a company decides whether to spend, and the purchase order is how it commits. Get the requisition step right and every downstream document, the PO, the receipt, the invoice, has a clean approval behind it. The tool above reads the purchase order that a requisition turns into, pulling the vendor, line items, and totals in about ten seconds, so the data behind an approved request never has to be typed in by hand.
A purchase requisition is a formal internal document an employee uses to ask for permission to buy goods or services. It names what is needed, the quantity, an estimated cost, and the reason, and it routes to the people who control the budget. Nothing is ordered from a supplier at this stage. The requisition is a request inside the company; only once it is approved does it become a purchase order that goes out to a vendor.
Most organizations run some version of these five steps, whether on paper, in a spreadsheet, or in a procurement system.
| Step | What happens | Who owns it |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Request | An employee raises a requisition naming the item, quantity, estimated cost, and business reason. | Requester |
| 2. Review | A manager checks the need is real and there is budget to cover it. | Department manager |
| 3. Approval | Finance or procurement approves, rejects, or sends the request back for changes. | Finance / procurement |
| 4. Purchase order | The approved requisition is converted into a purchase order and sent to the supplier. | Procurement |
| 5. Closeout | Goods are received and the invoice is matched, then the requisition is closed. | Receiving / AP |
The line between steps three and four is the important one. Before approval, the company owes nothing. After approval and conversion to a purchase order, an obligation to a supplier exists once the vendor accepts it.
The two documents are often confused because one becomes the other. A requisition is internal and asks for permission; a purchase order is external and commits to a supplier. A requisition never reaches the vendor. For the full field-by-field comparison, see purchase requisition vs purchase order.
The requisition step is where spend control actually lives. It forces a check against budget before the money is committed, creates an audit trail of who approved what, and stops maverick spending where staff buy first and explain later. Companies that skip it end up approving invoices after the fact, when the only options are to pay or to fight the vendor. A clean requisition-to-PO chain also makes the later purchase order approval process and the eventual invoice match far simpler, because every purchase already has a documented reason and sign-off. Once the goods arrive and the resulting invoice is approved, it flows into your accounts payable process with the approval already attached.
The slow parts are almost always approval routing and the retyping between steps. Digital approval routing removes the chase for signatures, and automating the data capture removes the keying when a requisition becomes a PO and again when the supplier PO comes back. Teams that automate purchase order data entry take the manual typing out of the last two steps, and accounts payable extraction keeps the same clean data flowing into matching. The wider flow is laid out in the purchase order process.
The purchase requisition process is the internal sequence a company uses to approve a purchase before it is ordered. An employee submits a requisition, a manager and then finance or procurement review it against budget, and once approved it is converted into a purchase order sent to the supplier. It is the control step that sits in front of the purchase order.
There are five common steps: an employee raises the requisition, a manager reviews the need and budget, finance or procurement approves it, the approved requisition is turned into a purchase order and sent to the vendor, and the requisition is closed once the goods and invoice are received. Some organizations add a sourcing or quote step before approval.
A purchase requisition is an internal request for permission to buy, and it never leaves the company. A purchase order is the external document sent to a supplier that commits to the purchase once accepted. The requisition comes first and, once approved, becomes the purchase order. One asks; the other commits.
Approval usually runs through the requester's manager first, to confirm the need and the budget, then through finance or procurement for a spend-control check. Higher-value requests often need additional sign-off from a department head or an executive, based on approval thresholds the company sets. The point is that someone accountable for the budget signs off before any order goes out.
It is the step where spending is controlled before money is committed. The requisition forces a budget check, creates an audit trail of who approved what, and prevents unauthorized or duplicate buying. Without it, invoices get approved after the fact, when the company has already received the goods and has little leverage over price or terms.
Yes. Approval routing can be automated so requests move to the right approver without manual chasing, and the data handoffs can be automated so the requisition, the resulting purchase order, and the supplier document are not retyped at each step. Automating the capture step keeps the same clean line-item data flowing from request through to invoice matching.
For the two-document comparison, purchase requisition vs purchase order goes deeper, and the purchase order approval process covers the sign-off step in detail. The full lifecycle is in the purchase order process.
PurchaseOrders reads purchase orders and returns structured data. It does not raise requisitions, route approvals, or hold budgets. Those stay in your procurement system, working from data that did not have to be typed in first.