What are Approval Flows in Power Automate?

Approval Flows in Microsoft Power Automate are automated workflows that manage business approval processes such as leave requests, purchase requests, expense claims, document approvals, invoice approvals, and other activities that require human decision-making.

Instead of relying on emails, spreadsheets, or manually tracking approval status, Power Automate can automatically initiate an approval, notify the appropriate approvers, capture their decisions and comments, and continue the business process based on the response. Microsoft provides several approval patterns, including Approve/Reject – Everyone must approve, First to respond, custom responses, and sequential approvals.

How Does a Power Automate Approval Flow Work?

A typical approval process follows this pattern:

Business Event → Approval Request → Approver Review → Decision → Conditional Processing → Record Update/Notification

For example, consider an employee submitting a purchase request:

1. An employee submits a request through Power Apps, Microsoft Forms, SharePoint, or another application.
2. Power Automate is triggered.
3. The flow retrieves relevant information such as requester, amount, department, and business justification.
4. An approval request is created.
5. The appropriate manager receives the approval request.
6. The manager approves or rejects the request.
7. Power Automate evaluates the response.
8. If approved, the purchase request can move to the next stage.
9. If rejected, the requester can be notified automatically.
10. The approval decision and comments can be recorded for tracking and auditing.

Approvers can respond through supported Microsoft experiences such as Outlook, Microsoft Teams, or the Power Automate approvals experience.

Types of Approval Flows

Power Automate supports different approval patterns depending on the business requirement:

• Everyone must approve – every assigned approver must provide approval.
• First to respond – the first response determines the outcome.
• Sequential approval – approvals occur in a predefined order.
• Custom responses – organizations can define responses beyond simple Approve/Reject.
• Parallel approval scenarios – multiple stakeholders can review the request concurrently.

For example, an organization could implement:

Employee → Manager → Department Head → Finance → Final Approval

This is particularly useful for procurement, expenses, discounts, contracts, and financial authorization processes.

Create an Approval vs Start and Wait for an Approval

This distinction is important for Power Automate developers.

Start and wait for an approval creates the approval and waits for the decision before continuing. Its outputs can include the response, approver information, comments, and related approval data.

Create an approval, on the other hand, creates the approval but doesn't block the flow waiting for the response. This can be useful when designing more asynchronous or complex orchestration patterns.

Enterprise Considerations

For enterprise implementations, approval flows should not simply be designed as a series of email notifications. Developers should consider:

• Approval hierarchy and delegation
• Approval timeouts
• Escalation mechanisms
• Reassignment
• Rejection and resubmission
• Auditability
• Error handling
• Security and permissions
• Environment strategy
• Dataverse integration
• Business rules and approval thresholds

For complex implementations, Power Automate approvals can also integrate with Dynamics 365, Dataverse, SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, SQL Server, and other enterprise systems.

In short: Power Automate approval flows provide a low-code way to automate human decision-making while maintaining visibility, consistency, and traceability across business processes.