The Scenario to Solve

Here’s a scenario I’ve seen play out more times than I can count: A planner runs Calculate Plan on a Monday morning. The worksheet populates with 200+ action messages. Maybe they’re tired, maybe they’re in a hurry, but they select all the lines and hit “Carry Out Action Message”. Twenty minutes later, the purchasing manager is looking at 75 new purchase orders—some for long lead-time items, some to vendors that haven’t been qualified yet, and at least a few that duplicate existing open orders.

Cue the panic, the finger-pointing, and the Monday afternoon spent manually deleting purchase orders that never should have been created in the first place. And they though Monday would be a good start to the week. 🙂

For years, the only way to prevent this in Business Central was process discipline and training, or maybe you could have done the change I published in 2014 to Default Accept Action Messages to No. You could require approval for the purchase orders, but planning worksheets? Nothing. You just had to trust that whoever had access knew what they were doing (or not doing any mistakes).

With Business Central version 28, that gap is finally closed. Approval workflows have been extended to the requisition and planning worksheets. Hurray!!

What Microsoft Added

Requisition, planning and even subcontracting worksheets now include full approval workflow support at the worksheet batch level, allowing you to send a worksheet batch for approval before you carry out planning or convert requisition lines into orders such as purchase orders or production orders.

The mechanics are straightforward. It’s the same approval framework you already know from general journals and purchase documents, just extended to planning and inventory areas. After a worksheet batch is sent for approval:

• You can’t insert, modify, or delete requisition or planning lines while an approval request is active.
• The batch is locked until the approval completes or is canceled.
• The workflow status shows on the worksheet pages, and approval actions (approve, reject, or delegate the batch) are available.

Why This Matters for Planning Teams

If you run MRP in Business Central, you know that planning worksheets are powerful—and powerful tools can cause damage when used incorrectly.

A single planning run can generate hundreds of suggested actions: new purchase orders, production orders, reschedules, quantity changes, and cancellations. Acting on those suggestions creates real financial commitments. An errant “Carry Out Action Message” can trigger tens of thousands in unnecessary purchasing or create production orders that tie up shop floor capacity for items you don’t actually need.

Up until now, you had two ‘workarounds’: 1. You could restrict who had the ability to carry out action messages using permissions, but that often meant bottlenecking all planning through one or two people. Or, 2. you had a process where planners are reviewing suggestions and pushing them to requisition worksheets for purchasers to approve and create purchase orders. This second option was quite common, but does not work that well for production orders.

With approval workflows, you another option: planners can generate and review the plan, but they need sign-off from a purchasing manager or production supervisor before those suggestions become real orders.

This is especially valuable for:

• Training environments where new planners are learning the system
• Multi-site operations where regional planners generate plans but central procurement reviews before committing
• High-volume environments where a planning mistake can quickly cascade into supply chain chaos
• Audit and compliance requirements where segregation of duties mandates that the person who proposes an action isn’t the same person who executes it

How Approval Workflows Work for Planning

The workflow operates at the batch level, which is exactly how it should work. Planners don’t submit individual requisition lines for approval—they submit the entire batch.

Here’s the typical flow:

1. Planner or an Automated MRP Process runs Calculate Plan
   The planning worksheet populates with action messages based on current demand, supply, and planning parameters.
2. Planner reviews and adjusts
   They filter, sort, and edit the suggestions. Maybe they accept some messages, modify quantities on others, and delete a few that don’t make sense. Note our Copilot Inventory Queries extension that can be used to interpret the messages.
3. Planner sends batch for approval
   Once the batch looks good, they choose “Send for Approval” from the worksheet. The workflow status shows on the worksheet pages, and the batch is locked.
4. Approver reviews
   The purchasing manager (or whoever is configured in the workflow) gets a notification. They open the batch, review the lines, and either approve, reject, or delegate the request.
5. Carry out action messages
   Once approved, the planner carries out the action messages to create purchase orders, production orders, or transfer orders.

If the approver rejects the batch, the planner gets it back with comments and can make adjustments before resubmitting.

The key detail: when an approval request is created for a worksheet batch, you can’t insert, modify, or delete requisition or planning lines. That prevents a scenario where a planner submits a batch for approval, then makes changes while it’s under review. The approver sees exactly what they’re approving.

It is also key to know that you might want to break your MRP run into multiple batches to simplify the management of this. Again, use an MRP Scheduling tool extension to do this for consistency and be very strategic on how you break down your MRP run into multiple batches (quite often there is a lot to gain by separating it in more manageable batches).

How to Set It Up

You configure these approvals under Workflows (same place as all the other workflows). From there:

1. Select an Requisition Worksheet Batch Approval Workflow template.
2. Specify the template and batch in the event conditions.
3. Configure approvers and enable the workflow.
4. Test it by opening a planning worksheet and choosing “Send for approval”.
5. Track the status of the approval in the Status field on the Approval Entries page.

The setup follows the same pattern as other Business Central workflows. If you’ve configured approval workflows for purchase orders or general journals, this will feel familiar. Note that the workflow template for this called Requisition Worksheet, but it works for both the Requisition Worksheets, the Planning Worksheets and the Subcontracting Worksheets (which is very nice).

Again these are batch-level approvals. If you have multiple planning batches (maybe one per location, one per type of products, or one per planner, etc..), you can configure separate workflows for each. You could have West Region planning auto-approved and East Region planning requiring manager sign-off, for example.

Microsoft Power Automate support is available through updated workflow events and responses, so if you’re using Power Automate for approval routing or notifications, you can integrate these new workflows into your existing flows. Nice! 🙂

My Take on Approval Workflows for Planning

This is one of those features that doesn’t sound exciting in a demo but will make a real operational difference for planning teams.

I’ve worked with manufacturers who had custom workflows built for this exact purpose – sometimes involving manual exports to Excel, email approvals, and re-imports. It worked, but it was clunky and error-prone. Now it’s native, which means it’s supported, it integrates cleanly with the rest of the approval framework, and it doesn’t require a customization to maintain through upgrades.

A few observations:

This closes a real compliance gap. If you’re in a regulated industry or you have segregation of duties requirements, the inability to enforce approvals on planning worksheets has been a documented finding in more than one audit I’ve seen. Now you can check that box.

It’s not just about preventing mistakes. Yes, it helps avoid accidental mass carry-outs, but it also creates visibility. When a batch goes through approval, there’s a record of who proposed the plan and who authorized it. That’s valuable for understanding planning decisions six months down the road when someone asks, “Why did we order 500 units of Item X in March?”

Batch-level approval is the right granularity. You don’t want approvers reviewing 200 individual requisition lines. They want to see the batch as a whole, understand the context (maybe the planner added a comment explaining why quantities are higher than usual), and approve or reject the plan. Microsoft got this right.

Training becomes safer. One of the challenges with training new planners is giving them enough access to learn the system without giving them enough rope to hang themselves. With approval workflows, you can let a trainee run Calculate Plan, review the suggestions, and submit for approval—knowing that someone experienced will review it before anything gets created. That’s a huge confidence boost for both the trainee and the person responsible for the planning function.

There are scenarios where this might be overkill. If you have a small team, a single experienced planner, and a stable planning environment, adding an approval step might just slow things down. Approval workflows are most valuable when you have multiple planners, high transaction volumes, or regulatory requirements. If that’s not your situation, you might enable it for specific batches (like annual planning or forecast updates) and leave day-to-day planning without approvals.

One limitation worth noting: this is batch-level, not line-level. You can’t approve some lines in a batch and reject others. It’s all or nothing. If an approver wants changes, they reject the batch, the planner makes adjustments, and they resubmit. That’s probably the right design for most scenarios, but if you need more granular approval (approve these 10 lines, hold these 5 for more research), you’ll still need to manage that through batch splitting or manual workarounds. Or you have someone like me make some changes to the logic to make it happened, if it can be described it can be programmed is my motto. 🙂

What to Watch For

If you’re planning to use this:

Test it with your actual planning batches. The workflow mechanics are standard, but how it fits into your planning process might require some adjustment. Figure out who should be the approver for each batch, what the SLA should be for approvals (same day? within 4 hours?), and what happens if someone is out sick.

Communicate the change. If your planners have been carrying out action messages without approvals for years, and you suddenly enable workflows, there will be confusion. Make sure everyone understands why the change is happening and what the new process looks like.

Consider Power Automate integration. If you want approvals routed through Teams or Outlook instead of the BC web client, the Power Automate support gives you that flexibility. It’s not required, but it might improve adoption if your team lives in Teams.

Think through batch structure. If you currently have one giant planning batch for everything, and you enable approvals, that means one approval request for potentially hundreds of lines. You might want to split batches by category (raw materials vs. finished goods) or by location so approvals are more focused.

Wrap-Up

Approval workflows for planning worksheets in Business Central version 28 is a quiet but important enhancement. It brings the same level of internal control to planning and inventory that you’ve always had for financials and purchasing.

If you’ve been relying on permissions and trust to keep planning under control, you now have a better option. If you’ve been building workarounds to get approval visibility into planning decisions, you can probably retire them.

And if you’ve ever had a Monday morning go sideways because someone carried out a planning batch they shouldn’t have, this feature will pay for itself the first time it prevents that from happening again.

Cheers!