How to Build Power Automate Approval Workflow for Beginners

today we're going to talk about one of the most common types of power automate flows and that is an approval flow to get started go to office.com and select power automate from the list of apps from the home screen we will navigate down to create and select automated cloud flow there are multiple scenarios in which you would use an approval flow such as getting a document approved a process or even just approving a vacation request for the sake of simplicity we're going to go with the vacation request example today the first thing we're going to do is pick a trigger for this flow there are several available in power automate but mine is based on a sharepoint list that list gathers basic information such as the employee's name dates of their vacation and supervisor's email address the different rows in the sharepoint list are called items therefore my trigger will be when an item is created now power automate knows that every time somebody enters information into my sharepoint list the flow should begin so the first thing i need to do is tell power automate where the list is in this case it is on my testing team and it is the vacation approval list add a new step and search the connectors and actions for approvals now i'm going to select start and wait for an approval now we're going to select an approval type this is going to be a matter of personal preference or your business rules you can approve or reject and wait for everyone to respond if there are multiple approvers or you can wait for the first person to respond if you only have one approver this is the choice that you're going to make but you can even choose to set up some custom responses for this scenario i'm just going to say approve or reject first to respond next we're going to enter the mandatory information for this action for the title i'm going to use a combination of dynamic content and static text so first what i'm going to do is i'm going to grab the title from the sharepoint list which in this case is the employee's name and behind that i will type in is requesting vacation next we are going to look at the assign to field you can put in the email addresses of a person or person's separated by semicolons if the approval is always going to the same list of people in my example i have included the supervisor's email address is one of the entries on the sharepoint list so that we can pull it in dynamically and this is all the information that you need to run this basic flow there are additional options under show advanced options however in this video we're going to keep it simple and just go with the mandatory entries at this point in building the flow you have the basic elements for an approval flow you could stop here if you wanted to however i'm going to take this one step further and i'm going to say that i want an email to go to the person who submitted the vacation request based on the approval status all right i'm going to break into the regularly scheduled programming here and share with you that when i first built this flow i built it a little bit differently and this is why i suggest that you always test your flows because when i tested it the outcome was different than what i originally expected based on the fact that i had built this flow for my job six months ago so we're gonna go ahead and jump back in and i'm going to point out to you the differences between how the flow used to work and how it works now so as you now know i had already completed this flow and then when i went to test it it was broken so now instead of watching me build the flow from scratch i'm just going to walk you through how the flow should look after building the start and wait for approval i clicked on new step originally i went straight for the condition control but the flow didn't work it kept going down the if no path every single time i consulted with a buddy of mine who knows way more about power automate than i do and he let me know that the reason my flow kept going down the if no path regardless of the answer i put in was because you needed to tie the flow to responses plural and have the condition control be the outcome so this is why i added the apply to each step and built the condition control within that container so once we said look for all of the responses grab the outcome and if it is equal to approve i want to send an email and that email is going to be built based on the fact that it's going to look at sharepoint and look for the email address of the person who created the sharepoint item ie the vacation request for simplicity i just put approved in the subject line i and then i just typed in some generic text in the body of the email this can be anything you want you can make it as simple or complicated as you want but you do have to have at least one character in this field the last thing i would like this flow to do is update the sharepoint list with the status of the approval so what i've done is i pulled in update item pointed it towards my testing team and said look at the vacation approval list and for the most recent request ie the id and update the status column to approve because remember we're running down the if yes side of the flow which means that the supervisor has said i can have vacation if the supervisor rejects the vacation request i.e it's not equal to approve then power automate's going to run down this if no request line i'm still going to have it send an email i gave it a generic subject line and this time what i did is i pulled in the comments from the approver to automatically be sent in the body of the email and i'm going to have power automate update the sharepoint list again except this time instead of grabbing the status of approved it's going to say it is rejected so now that i've fixed my flow by using the apply to each step we are going to save it and test it one more time so i'm going to say manually test the flow and we're going to navigate to teams and enter a vacation request so i'm just going to put in my name and say that i want to have friday off this column is a people column which means that i can search for my supervisor's name using the global address list from outlook so i'm just going to type in jessica give some comments and notice that the approval status is defaulted to in progress and then we're going to hit save i have navigated to teams and logged in as the supervisor so we can look at the approvals app i'm on the receive tab and you can see that heather is requesting vacation the status when it was created who created it and who it should be approved by i will click on the request and a floating dialog box will open which is where i can put in any comments that are needed and select approve or reject if this is your first time seeing the approvals app i will be making a video specifically on that topic and i will put it in the description box below as soon as the video is completed now we've come back to power automate and you can see that the flow has run successfully if i go to my teams and look at the sharepoint list you can see that heather requested vacation on the 26th from jessica where the status used to be in progress it is now approved and all of that happened via power automate for those of you interested in seeing what the broken flow looked like it's right here on the screen this way you know what to avoid thank you for learning with me today and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Heather Majors

Views: 25,056

Keywords: Heather Majors, Microsoft 365, power automate, power automate approval, power automate approval process, microsoft flow, flow approval workflow, how to, power automate tutorial, office 365, approval process, how to use approvals in microsoft teams, sharepoint, Power Automate and SharePiont, power automate approval workflow, power automate examples, microsoft flow tutorial, Power Platform, power automate approvals, Heathers Software Tutorials, Power Automate

Id: 8-kl3DnPDBs

Length: 8min 51sec (531 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 23 2021