Marketing PO & Purchase Request Approval
A purchase-request workflow for marketing spend - requesters submit vendor, amount, category, and budget line; it routes through approval tiers by amount, checks remaining budget, and only approved requests become committed POs.
A login-protected app where marketing requests for spend are submitted, checked against remaining budget, routed to the right approver by amount, approved or rejected with a full audit trail, and turned into committed POs you can export to finance as a clean CSV.
Before you start
- A free Vercel account
- A free Supabase account
- A free Resend account
- Your approval-threshold rules and current budget lines
The problem this kills
Marketing spend gets out of hand quietly. Someone agrees a vendor over email, the invoice shows up weeks later, and nobody is sure who approved it or whether the budget line had any money left. Spreadsheets get copied, amounts get fat-fingered, the same vendor gets paid twice, and finance finds out at month-end when it's too late to do anything about it.
You don't need a six-figure procurement system to fix this. You need one place where every marketing purchase request goes, gets checked against the budget before anyone says yes, lands on the right person's desk based on how big it is, and only becomes a real PO (purchase order - the committed promise to pay a vendor) after a human signs off.
What you'll build
A small web app, just for your team, where:
- Anyone on marketing submits a request: vendor, amount, category, budget line, and a short justification.
- The app instantly checks the remaining budget on that line and warns if the request would blow it.
- The request routes to the right approver tier automatically - small spend to a manager, big spend up the chain - using the thresholds you set.
- The approver reviews against the remaining budget and approves or rejects. Nothing is committed without sign-off.
- On approval, the app issues a PO number and records the committed spend so the budget reflects it immediately.
- You export an approved-PO CSV in exactly the columns your finance system expects.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
The plan is a complete, paste-and-go runbook for an AI coding agent (Claude Code). The first thing it does is interview you about your business - your current request process, the systems and spreadsheets you use, your real categories and budget-line names, your typical and peak request volumes, your exact approval tiers, and your messy edge cases - then it reads back a short tailored spec for your thumbs-up before building anything. You get a tool shaped around how your team actually buys things, not a generic template.
Inside you'll find: the discovery interview, the data model, the request form, the budget check, the tier routing, the approval screens, PO issuance, the committed-spend ledger, and the finance CSV export - each build step ending with a ready-to-copy prompt.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
- Login so only your team can use the tool.
- Row-level security so people only ever see their own organization's requests and budgets.
- A complete audit trail - who submitted, who approved or rejected, what changed, and exactly when.
- A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate before any PO is issued - the app drafts, the right approver reviews against remaining budget, and only then is a PO number committed.
- Duplicate guards - a unique request ID, plus a warning when the same vendor and amount show up again inside a short window.
Who it's for
Marketing ops people who need real spend control - tiered approvals, budget visibility, and an audit trail - without standing up a heavy procurement platform. If you live in spreadsheets today and you're tired of surprise invoices, this is for you. No coding background needed.
You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.