Section Home

Know Your Requisition's Life Cycle

This PDF shows the life cycle of a requisition in CUNYfirst. There are at least four check points during the lifecycle of a requisition before it can graduate to a purchase order. After creation it must first be validated by the chosen requestor's supervisor. This is validation and not funding approval. Then depending on the category it must be functionally approved by a category approver. For example if it's IT equipment an IT category approver will provide further validation. By the way, the category chosen drives what account code is chosen and for some budgets this is as critical as the budget code in terms of funding. Then it goes through a budget check. This is an automatic process where CUNYfirst checks to see if all the chart field information including the department code of the requestor has money to fund the request. If there is no money or the default chart field string which are part of the chosen requestor's profile are not correct, the requisition will go into an error status and not move forward. However, if to this point everything checks out ok, it moves forward to department level 1 & 2 approvals. These are the approvers who are authorized gatekeepers of budget codes. Your requisition only gets to them if the requestor that was chosen at creation has matching budget codes. Chart fields can and in some cases for special programs, be modified by a creator so that they route correctly to a department level 1 & 2 approver responsible for authorizing requisitions outside of the default values of the chosen requestor. Keep in mind that doing this requires special attention to understanding the sequence of chart fields. Any value that is not correct in the string of values that must be entered can kick back the requisition with a budget error. This is why it's critically important to pay constant attention to all requisitions entered into the system. Current there is no email alerts on errors. Many have assumed progress was being made only to find requisitions sitting in error past deadlines for getting purchases made. Finally, if all check points go well the requisition goes to Purchasing where Buyers create the purchase order which after other details too many to go into for this summary dispatch the purchase order to vendors who then close the lifecycle when goods and services are delivered. This however, starts a new cycle which will be described in another summary; "RECEIVING"

Requisitions.pdf