Supplier approvals

You can use Microsoft Power Automate (Microsoft Flow)  & Zapier to generate an approval when a new vendor is created in Zahara. This help article will talk you through how to setup each one and how the approval actually works. Microsoft Power Automate provides for a better approval experience provided you already us Microsoft Teams. Zapier has a very basic approval experience but it is very simple and doesn’t require anyone to login.  

To use Zapier, you will need our invitation link which is here 

Step 1 –  is to create a Zap. The event will be “New Supplier “

Step 2 –  We want to notify the approvers that something needs approving. We can do this in an Email / Slack / Teams. In my example, I’m using Microsoft Teams. The important thing here is that I need to give the approver a link to the Zapier approval dashboard and I will get that on the next step. 

Im using XML as the message format and have put a standard HTML tag around the approval URL. 

Step 3 – Next we will setup the approval step in which is a Zapier step.

The settings required are: 

You can choose which Zahara fields you wish to display in the table view for the approvals. Click on Copy Link – then paste this into a web browser to test. Use this URL in the step above in your notifications step. 

Step 4 – If the supplier is approved, there is nothing to do so the process stops. If it is rejected, then the outcome should be to make it clear the supplier is’t to be used. We can use a new Zahara step of “Update Supplier” to achieve this. You could add ” – Do not Use” after the supplier’s name or set the type to Unapproved. It is required that you put in the supplierID value – as shown below and the supplier reference. We need this to identify which supplier we are updating. 

Once complete, you can test the Zap by creating a new Supplier in the Business Unit you connected to. 

Here is an overview video: 

Create a new supplier in your business unit that is connected to this Zap. You should see your alert. In time, you will see the task in the approval screen as shown below:

The approval has two choices – Approve or Reject. Click Reject to test. You should then see your desired outcome. 

Im my test, I have set the Type to be Unapproved. 

Zahara has a published Power Automate (Microsoft Flow) connector. It behaves in a very similar way to Zapier but allows approvals for this purpose in Teams. A teams approval looks like this: 

The URL to login is: https://powerautomate.microsoft.com/en-us/

You will need the extra subscription to your 365 account to use Zahara’s premium connector. Login and click to create a new ‘Automated Cloud Flow’

Step 1 – you will need to create a new event of New Supplier event trigger (You will be prompted to connect to a Business Unit in Zahara. You will need the api key from Zahara which you will find in Business Settings  > Integrations. The New supplier step wont have any settings – just a link to the Business Unit. You can click the three dots to see which business unit you are connected to. 

Step 2 – Now add in an approval step. 

This is a Power Automate step – just search for Approval. Use the “Start and Wait for An Approval” step. Under Assigned to you will put the email address of the Teams users. In the example above, it is just one approver. The Description can be used to make it clear what’s required and you can see that a link can be created for the supplier record – just add the ID after the fixed part of the URL: https://myzahara.net/v3/business/suppliers/

You can adjust this step to suit your own requirements. 

Step 3 – the Conditional outcome 

Flow allows us to add a Condition step as shown below. This is a Yes / No outcome. The important part here is the select outcome from previous steps – choose Responses

The app important condition is to use the Response and use Contains: “Approve” 

On my Yes side I have nothing to do here. On the No side – ie not approved, I have an Update supplier step and a message being posted back to Teams. My update supplier step is the same as the one above under Zapier. 

Here is an overview video of the setup 

Even though Zahara has it’s own built-in approvals, you can still use the functionality of Zahara with incredibly useful tools like Zapier and Flow to create custom outcomes.