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Approval Workflows for Requisition Worksheets and Item Journals in BC 2026 Wave 1 — Finally Native

 Introduction

If you have implemented Business Central for a manufacturing or distribution client with any meaningful governance requirement, you have almost certainly had this conversation:

"Can we put an approval on the requisition worksheet before purchase orders are created?"

Or this one:

"We need someone to sign off on inventory adjustments before they are posted. Can BC do that natively?"

Until BC 28, the honest answer was no — not natively. Getting approvals on item journals or requisition worksheets required either custom workflow development, a third-party ISV solution, or a manual offline process that relied entirely on discipline rather than system control.

With 2026 Release Wave 1 (BC 28, GA April 2026), Microsoft has extended the standard approval workflow framework to cover both item journals and requisition and planning worksheets. This post breaks down exactly what is now possible, the important limitations to be aware of, and why this matters particularly for manufacturing operations.

What BC 28 delivers

1. Approval workflows for item journals

BC 28 extends approval workflows to include item journals. Users can send batches from the Item, Physical Inventory, Output, and Consumption Journals.

This means the following journals now support the full standard approval workflow:

  • Item Journal — general inventory adjustments, stock corrections
  • Physical Inventory Journal — count-based adjustments after a physical stock take
  • Output Journal — production order output postings
  • Consumption Journal — production order consumption postings

When a journal batch has an approval entry in progress, you cannot edit, delete, or post the record until the approval is completed or cancelled. The workflow status shows on the journal pages, and the Approve, Reject, Delegate, and Comments approval actions are available.

What this means for manufacturing specifically:

For manufacturers, the Output Journal and Consumption Journal approvals are the most operationally significant. Output journal postings drive finished goods inventory and production order completion. Consumption journal postings drive material cost and component inventory. Both feed directly into production order variance calculations. Having a supervisor or planner review these postings before they hit the ledger — with a system-enforced lock rather than a polite reminder — is a meaningful step up in manufacturing data integrity.



2. Approval workflows for requisition and planning worksheets

Full batch-level approval workflows are also available for requisition and planning worksheets. Once an approval request is raised, no insert, modification, or deletion of planning lines is permitted until it is resolved. Approvers can approve, reject, or delegate as standard.

For manufacturers running MRP-driven procurement, this is particularly valuable. The requisition worksheet is where your planner reviews MRP suggestions and converts them into purchase orders. A batch-level approval before that conversion means a manager or purchasing supervisor can review the full picture of what is about to be ordered — quantities, vendors, dates — before it becomes a committed purchase order.

Worksheet-level approval prevents changes to planning data while decisions are pending. This ensures the data the approver sees is the data that will be acted upon — no last-minute changes to the worksheet while an approval is in progress.



Important limitations to know before implementing

Batch-level only — not line-level

Line-level approvals are not yet supported. The approval applies to the entire journal batch or worksheet batch, not to individual lines within it.

For most manufacturing operations, batch-level approval is sufficient and reflects how planning review actually works in practice. A production planner presents the full run plan for the week and a purchasing manager signs it off. Line-by-line approval would often be impractical at the volume and speed manufacturing operations require.

Practical tip: Create named requisition worksheet batches per planner or per planning frequency — for example, WEEKLY-MRP or PLANNER-01 — before enabling the approval workflow. This also gives you a cleaner audit trail, since each batch is identifiable by who submitted it for approval.

How to set it up — key steps

Setting up approval workflows for these documents follows the same pattern as existing BC workflow setup, which keeps the learning curve low for anyone familiar with BC's workflow framework.

  1. Go to Workflow Templates — search for the new standard workflow templates for item journals and requisition worksheets. These are pre-built templates that ship with BC 28, which means you do not need to build the workflow from scratch.
  2. Create a workflow from the template — copy the template and enable it for your environment.
  3. Assign approvers — configure the approval hierarchy using the Approval User Setup page. Define who can approve which document types and whether a direct approver, approval chain, or first available approver model applies.
  4. Create named batches — for requisition worksheets, create named batches to replace the default batch for any batch that will go through the approval process.
  5. Test in sandbox — run through the full cycle: submit for approval, approve, reject, and delegate — before enabling in production.

Practical tip: When setting up for the first time, start with the Output Journal workflow only. This is the highest-value approval for manufacturing and the least disruptive to existing processes. Once planners are comfortable with the approval step in their output posting routine, extend to consumption journals and then the requisition worksheet.

Final thought

This is one of those updates that does not make headlines but makes a real difference to the organizations that need it. If you implement BC for manufacturers or distributors with any purchasing governance or inventory control requirements, review this feature as part of your BC 28 upgrade assessment.

 

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