My company would like to activate the purchase order approval process and it looked simple until I discovered a note in SuiteAnswers saying that in order that the approval routing hierarchy work, purchasing requests must be made through the Employee Center role. Is this correct? If so, seems awful restrictive.

I believe this is correct. Reason being if you're in a full access role you can set the employee to whomever you want, or leave it blank so it would make the approval routing hierarchy a 2 foot high fence. You should also be able to build a CUSTOM PO approval process using workflow which would let you set any rules you want including approval for POs created with a full-access role but you'd need to build the whole thing from scratch and wouldn't be able to leverage the native routing hierarchy for purchase and approval limits. Limiting create/edit access to POs to only A/P, inventory mgmt and employee center is a pretty clean way to go imho, and all users have to get accustomed to is swapping roles....

Yeah, I saw the suggestion in SuiteAnswers to script an approval process, and may have to go that route, but got excited when it looked like I could just 'flip the switch' and have PO approval defer to the supervisor or designated approver. We have no additional employee center licenses to pass out at this time, so I guess it's back to the design phase. Thanks for your input.

Work flowing a Purchase Order approval is not difficult. There is even a template for Purchase Order approval

Fair point Mark. I guess it depends on the requirements. Like if you just need supervisor or designated approver to approve, super easy. If you need routing based on amounts to different approvers, or tiered approval, it can get a bit more involved. that's all I was saying.