A purchase requisition is the internal request to buy something, raised by the person who needs it and approved before a buyer turns it into a purchase order.
A purchase requisition is an internal document in which an employee asks the company to buy something. It records what is needed, how much, roughly when, and which cost centre or project should carry the cost. It is not an order: it never leaves the company, it commits nobody to a supplier, and it becomes a purchase order only after an authorised person approves it and a buyer chooses the vendor and the price.
The requisition exists to move the approval to the front of the cycle. If nobody approves before the order is placed, the first person who sees the commitment is the accountant looking at the invoice, when the goods are already delivered and refusing to pay is no longer realistic. A requisition step also puts a cost centre and a budget line on the request while there is still time to say no, and it gives the buyer a chance to consolidate three separate requests for the same item into one order at a better price.
Business Central does not ship a requisition document with an approval flow in the way dedicated procure to pay suites do, and it is worth being precise here because of a name collision. The BC Requisition Worksheet is a planning tool: it calculates replenishment suggestions from demand and reordering policies and carries them out into purchase orders. It is designed for a planner, not for a warehouse technician asking for a laptop, and it has no approval concept of its own. What BC does offer is the purchase quote, which can be created, routed through the standard purchase document approval workflow with per approver amount limits, and then converted with Make Order. Many teams use the purchase quote as a stand in requisition; others buy an add on or keep the request step outside the ERP.
A lab technician needs a spare centrifuge rotor. She raises a request for 1 unit, estimated CHF 1,900, charged to cost centre LAB-02. Her department head has an approval limit of CHF 2,500, so the request clears in one step on the same day. The buyer sees that a second lab raised a similar request for CHF 1,900 the week before, combines both onto one purchase order for CHF 3,800 with the contracted supplier, and applies the 5 percent volume tier that only starts above CHF 3,000, saving CHF 190 that neither requester could have obtained alone.
Requisitions fail in two directions. If the flow is too heavy, people stop using it and order by email or company card, which is exactly the maverick spend the step was meant to prevent. If it is too light, everything is approved by default and the control is theatre. Useful measures are the median time from request to approval, the share of purchase orders that trace back to an approved request, and the number of requests rejected or amended, because a rejection rate of zero usually means nobody is really reading them.
A requisition is an internal request for permission to buy and has no legal effect outside the company. A purchase order is the external commitment sent to a named supplier with agreed quantities, prices and delivery terms.
No, despite the name. It is a planning worksheet that turns demand and reordering policies into purchase suggestions for a planner or buyer. It contains no approval step and is not meant for end users raising ad hoc requests.
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