Ideas for Implementing Magento Order Approval process?

I’m in need of setting up approvers for orders that customers submit.

There is no credit card authorization required. For example, an employee from a company puts foo and bar into their shopping cart and checks out. One of the employee’s bosses need to approve it (the superiors will have accounts in magento already) before they can be invoiced. So when an order is placed, an email needs to go to the bosses, with a URL to the order. Then they can accept it or decline it.

Is there an existing extension that does something like this or would be a good starting point?

If I was looking to create my own module for this, this looks like the workflow:

1. Customer placing the initial order should be straightforward and status should be On Hold.
2. The order triggers a ch开发者_开发技巧eck to see who the customer bosses are and sends them a link to the order
3. The bosses have to be able to login somewhere and see the order and be able to click accept or decline.
4. Order is set to Pending Payment or something similar if approved.
5. Admin invoices the order.

Coding is not an issue. I’m just wondering whats a good starting point or pointers to any existing references would be great.

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Have you tought about adding new usergroup to backend and only allowing them to access placed orders?