Several buyers for each business customer of your PrestaShop shop

A company starts from the account of a business customer approved in LNK Pro Accounts, a required module. In their account, on the “My company” page, the customer clicks “Create my company”: the name is filled in with their registered business name. From the back office, you can also create the company of a customer chosen by e-mail or ID. Nothing is automatic: the customer becomes the owner and administrator of the company.

Colleagues join it by invitation: an e-mail and a role, a link valid for 14 days, usable only once, sent by e-mail. The colleague signs in with the invited address, or creates an account from the “Join” page. An invitation can be revoked as long as it has not been used, and the number of invitations per company and per hour is limited (20 by default).

The company always keeps at least one active administrator, and a member never gives a role with more permissions than their own. A removed member becomes an ordinary customer again.

Five roles are created in each shop: Administrator, Approver, Buyer, Site manager and Read only. Under “Settings › Roles”, you name each role in each language, tick its permissions and set its default limits.

The permissions to tick: see prices, place orders, approve other members' carts, accept a quote, see invoices, invite members, manage members, manage sites. Two rules are enforced by the server: the administrator always keeps every permission, and a role without “See prices” never has “Place orders”.

In the shop, a member without “Place orders” fills their cart; the checkout sends them back to the cart with a message. Without “See invoices”, PDF invoices and credit slips are refused. Without “Accept a quote”, accepting a quote from LNK Quotes is refused. A customer who belongs to no company keeps the shop as it is.

Each member can have a limit per order and a limit per month, excluding tax and shipping, in the shop's default currency: their own, set by the company administrator, otherwise the one of their role. The administrator never has a limit. The month counts the member's orders since the 1st, paid or not, except cancelled, refunded or failed ones.

Above a limit, the cart shows “Send for approval”. The cart is then kept as it is and the buyer goes on with a new cart. No order is created before approval: your back office only shows real orders.

A colleague with the approval permission receives an e-mail, opens the “Approvals” page of their account and approves or refuses with a reason. Nobody approves their own request, administrator included. The approved cart goes back to the buyer, who orders it as it is: any change cancels the approval. A request expires after 30 days by default, and a reminder goes to the approvers while it waits (every 2 days by default).

The checkout and the payment modules refuse a cart above a limit that has not been approved. An order created outside the shop by the server notification of a payment provider cannot be blocked without an override: it is logged and written to the company history.

You name the site to suit your customers' trade, in the singular and the plural, in each language: “Site” by default, “Work site”, “Branch” or “Agency” if you wish. The chosen word is used everywhere, in the shop and in the e-mails.

A member with “Manage sites” creates the company's sites from the “My company” page: name, delivery address, contact on site, attached members and managers, optional budget excluding tax per month, per year or overall, open or closed.

Under the cart, the member chooses the site of their order among those they can access. With only one possible site, it is assigned automatically. The address of the site becomes the delivery address of the cart. Each order is recorded with its company and its site.

The amount spent of a budget counts the site's orders over the period, paid or not, except cancelled, refunded or failed ones. Beyond the remainder, the cart goes for approval, for every member, administrator included. The “Site manager” role approves the carts of the sites they manage. When nobody else can approve, the member who manages the sites raises the budget themselves.

An administrator shares one of their addresses with the company: each member receives a copy in their address book, kept up to date. A copy already used by an order stays untouched: a new copy replaces it. A copy edited by its member becomes a personal address.

In their account, each member finds “My company”, the company dashboard, the “Approvals” page and the sites and budgets page.

• Dashboard: orders in progress (the whole company for those who see invoices or manage sites, their sites for a site manager, their own for the others), requests to approve, site budgets.
• Sites and budgets: each readable site, with its budget, its period, the amount spent and the remainder.
• Company bar at the top of the page: company name, member's role, “To approve” with the number of requests they can decide.

The Customers menu receives “LNK Company Staff”: the list of companies, the creation of a company for a customer, the settings and the roles. The page of each company shows, read only, its members and their limits (the member's own limit, the one of their role, or none for an administrator), its sites and their budgets, and the history of approval requests.

Accounting export: the valid orders of the companies, filtered by company, by site and by period, as CSV (semicolon, UTF-8). Columns: date, reference, company, site, buyer, total excluding and including tax, currency, and the customer reference from LNK Order Reference when that module is active. The file is sent directly, nothing is written to disk.

The screens follow the common skin of the LNK modules, with rare settings folded under “Advanced”.

For a member whose role does not have “See prices”, prices are emptied on product pages, lists, the cart and the order history. The module hides prices on display; it does not protect confidential data.

Still visible: the amounts of the payment step rendered by the payment modules (the checkout is closed to this member anyway), PrestaShop's e-mails and PDFs, the credit slips and vouchers pages of the customer account, the module's approval e-mails (they carry the cart total), and modules that compute a price outside the core presenters, such as LNK Quick Order.

On PrestaShop 1.7.7 (package 1.1.0), the core does not call the presentation hooks: removing “See prices” there only blocks ordering, prices stay displayed.

Figure measured on the delivered file, compressed with gzip (level 9). The stylesheet: 0.9 KB (869 bytes), loaded only on the five pages of the module (My company, Join, Approvals, Dashboard, Sites and budgets). No script in the shop. Nothing on the home page, categories or product pages. The company bar, the site choice and the approval block under the cart, and the indicators widget add no stylesheet or script of the module: the theme styles them.

Theme contracts lnk.companies.approval/1 and lnk.companies.front/1, usable by any theme that calls their hooks:

• displayLnkCompanyBar: the company bar, at the top of the page;
• displayLnkCompanySiteSelect: the site choice, under the cart or on a quick order page;
• displayLnkCompanyApproval: the approval block under the cart;
• {widget name='lnk_companies' mode='kpi'}: orders in progress, requests to approve, remaining budget.

Without these hooks, the module renders its blocks in the native positions (top of the page, under the cart); a theme that places them itself turns these renderings off with a single setting. Nothing is rendered for a visitor. Templates can be overridden in the theme.

The other LNK modules read a customer's permissions through two public hooks, actionLnkPriceVisibility and actionLnkOrderPermission, without depending on this module.

Companies, roles, approval requests and settings per shop; the module page saves in the scope shown at the top of the screen. A new shop receives the default roles, a deleted shop is cleaned up.

Each version is checked by a real installation: PrestaShop 1.7.8 and 8.1 for the 1.1.N package, PrestaShop 9.0 for the 1.9.N package. The tests cover installation, display, back office and uninstallation.

On uninstall, companies, their members, their sites and their approval requests are kept by default. Their deletion is requested in two steps, under “Advanced”.