Digital Transformation Today

Additional Microsoft Flow Approval Functionality Now Available

Painful approval scenarios are prime candidates for business process automation. The prospect of saving time in these processes are a gateway for users to realize Flow’s value. Microsoft Flow approvals are one of the most valuable features of the product. Recently additions have been made that make Flow approvals even more powerful.

Flow approvals already offered a centralized location where users can view all of their approvals waiting for them as well as all of the approvals they have sent. Approvals can be consecutive or parallel, and you can choose whether only one approver or all of them must either approve or reject.

Now additional Flow approval actions, Create and approval (V2) and Start and wait for an approval (V2), have been added that provide the ability for custom responses. With traditional Flow approvals an approver can either approve or reject a request and provide comments. Now with the new approval actions you can enter custom response options. Then, based on the response picked different actions can occur. An important piece of information to note is that the new approval actions require a P1 Flow license. If you are using the free or Office 365 version of Flow you will not be able to use the new approval options.







Here is an example: When a new employee is onboarded to an organization there is New Employee Paperwork that needs to be completed and then reviewed first by a Benefits Specialist and then by the Human Resources Manager. When reviewing the approval, they can choose from the options of Complete, Missing Information, or Incorrect Information and then enter comments. Based on what is selected an email is sent to the employee providing them feedback and the comments that were entered. Then they have the chance to make changes. When they edit the paperwork the Benefits Specialist and Human Resources Manager receive another approval.







It was also recently announced that approval processes can now include guest users from outside of your organization as approvers. There are often approval processes for items such as billing information or documents that require a customer, partner, or vendor to approve. It will now be possible to send approvals to decision makers that are outside of your organization and for them to approve in the same ways always possible; email, Flow portal, and mobile app.


If you have not already started exploring Microsoft Flow as your solution to automate your approval business processes, now is the time. Check out the Flow Community blog for ideas and support.

Need help automating a manual process? Contact the experts at Withum by scheduling a complimentary consultation online or by contacting us at 240-406-9960.

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