Build a complete approval flow

1. Building a complete flow end-to-end with approvals

Now it's time to combine everything you've learned into one real-world workflow. Every organization has processes that need a human decision, like expense approvals, leave requests, or contract sign-offs. Let's build a complete approval flow.

2. The Approvals connector

The Approvals connector automates human decision-making in workflows. It's a Standard connector, with no Premium license needed, and it's included with your Microsoft 365 licensing. One thing that catches people out is that it has no trigger. Approvals can never start a flow. They always come after a trigger and usually some setup, like looking up who needs to approve. On first use, Power Automate provisions a Dataverse database to store approval records, which takes about a minute and only happens once.

3. Approval actions

There are four approval actions, starting with Create an approval, which builds the request and keeps going so the flow doesn't stop. You pair it with Wait for an approval when you need to do something between sending and pausing, like posting a Teams notification first. Start and wait for an approval is the most commonly used, since it combines both into one step. And Start and wait for an approval of text is the same, but it adds a Suggested Text field the approver can edit before responding, which is useful when they need to verify or adjust a value.

4. Approval type configuration

Inside the approval action, the first parameter is Approval type, which controls how many people need to respond and what options they see. Approve or Reject gives two choices, where First to respond means whoever replies first decides, while Everyone must approve needs all approvers to agree, with any single rejection stopping it. With Custom Responses, you can add your own options like Proceed, Revise, or Cancel, and choose whether to wait for one response or all. And Sequential Approval moves the request from one approver to the next in a defined order, so the second approver doesn't see the request until the first one responds.

5. Where approvers respond

Approvers aren't limited to one place. They can respond from Outlook on desktop or in the browser, from a Microsoft Teams adaptive card, from the Power Automate approval center on the web, or from the Power Automate mobile app. Once they respond from any channel, the approval updates everywhere, with no duplicate responses and no race conditions.

6. Approval metadata and the Outcome token

Once the approver responds, the flow resumes with rich metadata available as dynamic content. The Outcome token gives you the response, which is the literal string "Approve", "Reject", or whatever custom response was selected. You also get date and time stamps for when the request was sent, when each approver responded, and when the approval completed. And if the approver added comments, those are captured too, with one record per approver. To branch on the result, you wire Outcome into a Condition where it equals "Approve" with a capital A. The comparison is case-sensitive, so lowercase "approve" sends every request down the wrong branch even when the approver clicked Approve.

7. Let's practice!

Now it's time to put it together and build a complete approval flow.

Create Your Free Account

By continuing, you accept our Terms of Use, our Privacy Policy and that your data is stored in the USA.