Who places orders, and how does the order digest work?
Last verified October 18, 2026
Anyone with Approve & place orders can mark an approved request as ordered. To make sure someone actually buys it, pick your order placers under Team Settings > Who places orders; they get one "ready to place" digest listing everything approved and waiting, about 15 minutes after the last approval by default.
You need: Manage settings to choose order placers; Approve & place orders to mark orders as ordered
Approving and placing are separate steps
An approved request isn't bought yet. Someone still has to go to the vendor, check out and record what was charged. In Robolyst that's the same permission as approving: Approve & place orders.
The order placer list decides who gets told, not who's allowed. It's usually the mentor holding the card.
Choose your order placers
- Go to Team Settings (
/team-management/settings). - Scroll to Who places orders.
- Click each person who buys parts for the team.
- Click Save changes.
If you pick someone whose role doesn't have Approve & place orders, a warning names them. They'll still get the digest, but the button to mark orders as ordered won't be there for them. If you can manage roles, a Grant it to the ... role button fixes this. It changes the whole role, so everyone with that role gets the permission.
With nobody selected, approved orders sit in the queue and nobody is told.
How the digest works
Robolyst checks for approved, unplaced orders once an hour. For each team it gathers every order that:
- is approved but not yet ordered,
- was approved at least the hold time ago (15 minutes unless you changed it), and
- hasn't been in a digest before.
Each order placer gets one notification titled something like 3 orders ready to place, with an estimated total and up to five order titles (the rest are counted as "and N more"). It goes out on whichever channels each person has turned on for that notification.
Approving ten orders in one sitting sends one digest, not ten. Change the hold time under Finance rules > Alerts with Hold the "ready to place" digest for. Setting it to 0 sends on the next hourly check.
An order only appears in one digest. If you set up placers for the first time, the first digest covers everything already waiting.
Placing an order
From a single order:
- Open the order from Finance > Orders.
- Each vendor has its own group. Click Mark ordered on the one you bought.
- Enter the Charged total, including tax and shipping, and an optional tracking number and receipt.
- Click Confirm ordered.
Buying for several requests at once? Click Vendor carts on the Orders page. It gathers every approved, unbought item into one cart per vendor. Use Copy list to paste the items into the vendor's site, then Mark cart ordered with the one charged total. Tax and shipping are split across the orders in proportion to their cost.
The requester is notified when their order is placed, and again when it's received.