Resources / Business Office / Purchase requisitions

How school districts route purchase requisitions and keep an audit trail of every approval

The short answer

A purchase requisition is a request to spend money that has to travel through a defined sequence of approvers before a purchase order is issued. Who approves it depends on the amount, the fund it draws from, and sometimes the department, so districts that handle it reliably use rule-based routing: the request moves to the right approver on its own instead of being carried from desk to desk. Each approval is captured with a name and a timestamp as it happens, and that running record is the audit trail an auditor asks for later. The record is only as reliable as the process that produces it, so the routing and the record have to be one system rather than two separate efforts.

On this page

Why the finance system does not cover it How districts handle it now Where it goes wrong

What doing it well actually requires Common questions How Flow Forms handles it

Why the finance system does not cover it

A finance or accounting system is built to record a transaction, not to run the approval that authorizes it. It knows the ledger. It does not know the sequence of people who have to say yes before the money moves, and it was never meant to. So the moment a requisition needs routing, that part of the work happens somewhere outside the finance system, on a paper form, in an email thread, or in a shared spreadsheet, and the finance system only picks up the story at the end, once the purchase is already approved and entered.

That is not a gap in the software. It is the edge of what the software was designed to do. But it means the part that carries the most risk, proving who authorized a purchase and when, happens in whatever way each district has assembled over the years.

How districts handle it now

In most districts, a staff member fills out a requisition, usually a paper form, a fillable PDF, or a Google Form. It goes to a supervisor, then, depending on the dollar amount and the fund it draws from, to a business manager, a superintendent, and above a set threshold to the board. Each handoff is a person walking the form to the next desk, an email with the form attached, or a line updated in a spreadsheet that tracks what is out for approval.

Someone in the business office holds the whole picture, in their head or in that spreadsheet, and follows up when a request goes quiet. It works, and it is also time intensive in a way that gets worse as the number of requests grows. The tracking becomes a job of its own, done by the person who can least afford another one.

Where it goes wrong

The failure is quiet. A requisition lands in an approver's inbox the week they are out, and it sits. Nothing announces a form that has stopped moving, so nobody knows it has stalled. The business office finds out days later, when a vendor calls about an order that never came, or a teacher asks why the thing they requested three weeks ago still has not arrived.

A specialist at a Montana state agency described the old normal exactly: when a document got snagged in the process, it sometimes took days just to find out where the hold up was.

The purchase was always going to be approved. The delay was not a decision anyone made. It was the cost of a process where a stalled request stays invisible until someone downstream notices the consequence.

What doing it well actually requires

A requisition process that holds up under an audit has a few specific properties, and none of them are about the form itself.

The routing follows a rule, not a memory

The path a requisition takes is set by the dollar amount, the funding source, and the department, so the request knows its own next stop without anyone deciding it by hand each time. A second approver above a threshold is applied automatically, the same way on every request, instead of being remembered when someone happens to think of it.

The status is visible while the requisition is in flight

Anyone who needs to know where a request sits can see it without sending an email to ask. That single property removes most of the follow-up work, because the business office stops being the tracking system and goes back to being the office.

Every approval carries its own proof

Each sign-off is captured with a name and a timestamp as it happens, not reconstructed afterward from inboxes and memory. A trail assembled after the fact is an argument about what probably occurred. A trail logged in real time is a record, and in an audit that difference is the whole point.

The process survives turnover

The sequence lives in the system, not in the head of the person who has always run it. A new business manager or a new approver steps into a path that already knows how requisitions move, instead of learning it by getting it wrong once. Stephen Schreibeis, superintendent at Glendive Public Schools, named this exact cost from the old way of doing it: the constant work of explaining the process to new staff members. With the sequence built into the system, he says that stress is gone.

Common questions

Questions we hear from every business office.

What is the difference between a purchase requisition and a purchase order?

A requisition is the internal request to make a purchase, routed for approval. A purchase order is the authorized document issued to the vendor once the requisition clears. The requisition is the part that needs routing and a record; the purchase order is the outcome.

Who should approve a purchase requisition?

That depends on the district. Most set approval by dollar threshold, by funding source, and sometimes by department, with higher amounts requiring additional sign-off up to the board. The specific thresholds and approvers live in your district's purchasing policy, and the process should follow that policy rather than replace it.

Do we need a second approver over a certain dollar amount?

Many districts require one, and the threshold is set by board or district policy. What matters operationally is that the second approver is applied automatically at the right amount, every time, rather than depending on someone remembering to add them.

How long do we need to keep requisition approval records?

Retention is governed by your state's records retention schedule and your own local policy, and internal approval records are generally covered by it. The practical requirement is that the record stays complete and retrievable for the full retention period, not just present at the moment of approval.

Will the approval history hold up in an audit?

It holds up when it is complete and timestamped: who approved, in what order, and when. A record generated automatically as each approval happens meets that bar, because there is nothing to reconstruct. A trail pieced together afterward from emails is where the questions start.

How Flow Forms handles it

Flow Forms builds purchase requisition routing to the approval paths a district actually uses, set by dollar threshold, funding source, and department. A request moves to the right approver on its own, anyone can see where it sits at any moment, and every approval is captured with a name and a timestamp in a record built as the work happens rather than assembled later. Your finance system stays exactly where it is; this handles the routing and the record that have to happen before a purchase order is issued.

This is proven in the field. The Montana Office of Public Instruction moved its procurement onto routed digital forms and now completes initial data entry in minutes versus an hour or more, with anyone able to open a window and see where a request sits in the queue rather than spending days finding out where it stalled. Harlowton Public Schools runs its requisitions through Flow Forms alongside leave, travel, and P-card requests.

See how it would work for your district →