Purchase Approvals Stuck in Odoo's Backend? A Simple Mobile Approve/Reject App

Not because Odoo's approval flow is broken; it works. The bottleneck is usually access: the person who needs to approve is traveling, between meetings, or otherwise away from a desktop, and opening the full Odoo backend on a phone to find one purchase order among everything else in the interface is enough friction that approvals sit unactioned for longer than they should. It's a well-documented, ordinary operational pain point, not a sign anything is misconfigured.

A purchase order moves through a sequence of states, generally draft, then sent to the vendor, then to approve, then confirmed as an actual purchase. Depending on how purchasing is configured, approval authority can be tied to approval limits, meaning orders above a certain amount require a manager's sign-off before they can move forward, while smaller orders may not need that extra step. The mechanism is real and already enforces this correctly; the only friction is the interface it has to be done through.

Only what a manager needs to decide, and nothing else: the vendor, the total amount, the line items being purchased, and ideally a short reason or note field if the requester attached one. Two large, unambiguous actions, approve and reject, sized for a thumb on a phone screen. No navigation menu, no unrelated Odoo modules visible, no need to understand where else in Odoo this order lives.

Yes, if it's built correctly: the app should write the decision straight back to the real purchase.order record through Odoo's API, calling the same underlying approval action Odoo's own backend button would trigger, rather than some separate tracking mechanism that then has to be manually reconciled with Odoo later. Done that way, there's exactly one source of truth: Odoo's own record, just reachable through a faster interface for that one specific action.

Write-back, and worth treating with the same care as any other write-back integration: the app is creating a real state change on a real financial record, so it needs to handle what happens if the write fails partway, and it needs the approve/reject action tied to a properly authenticated user, not a shared login, so the record of who approved what stays accurate. See the read-only vs. write-back guide, linked below, for what that care actually involves in practice.

No, it sits on top of it. Nothing about the underlying draft-to-purchase flow, approval limits, or vendor management changes; the app is a narrow, faster front door for one specific action (approve or reject) that a manager currently has to open the full Odoo backend to perform. Everything else about how purchasing works in Odoo stays exactly as it is.