Friday Feature – The Template Two Step

The recently added template option for vendor and stores requisitions is an easy addition to any of your dance moves.  You don’t have to be a professional “Dancing with the Stars” type user either.  All users can create templates.

But I speak too fast.  Actually, there are two types of templates: personal and organization.  And, while it is true that all users can create personal templates, only users with specific user-based permissions can create organization templates.  So, for the sake of getting everybody on the dance floor, let’s focus only on the personal templates.  (I will save the organization templates for another Friday Feature!)

Let’s say you need to buy books, the same books from the same vendor, year after year. Yeah, there may be a few tweaks to your order, but not much and it is a big one.  Yeah, you could copy the requisition, but it copies accounts, which just makes you have to change them when you would rather add them (it seems cleaner that way).  What you want is to only “copy” certain fields, then have the luxury of filling out the other fields as necessary.

This situation calls for a template.  This is what you do.  Go ahead and copy that  requisition from last year, then add/change/clear any fields you desire, and finally use the Save as Personal Template task to save it as a template.  This “personal template” can only be seen by you.

Now you can use this template year after year (searching for it using the Template Reqs parameter on the search page), making changes as necessary, saving you a ton of time, and making you look like you are dancing on air.

Note: Templates are designed for creating requisitions.  Since they are not “real” requisitions, they cannot be submitted and do not appear on requisition reports (although you can run a snapshot).