Approval Process - some questions

[perksyaus]

Hi,

I am starting with the approval process and I am trying to understand the flow of how things work.  I have some questions:

The scenario I have is I have a sharepoint list with multiple rows containing invoices.

at a certain time each day I want to collect all invoices of a certain type and send them through for approval.  I didnt want to wait for the approval - some could take days - rather I thought I could capture the approval reply and use that....but I am not sure that is possible.  So my questions are:

Can I bundle up all type of invoices and loop through the approval process?

Do I have to wait for the approval in the same flow?  or is there a way to trigger off the approval reply.

Denise

[SudeepGhatakNZ]

@perksyaus ,

The approval action in flow is out of the box and it takes care of scenarios (such as multiple approvers, simultaneous approvals, etc). But you cannot force an Approval task to complete (there are some caveats there but I won't go into them)

You could, however, have a status column in your library (with options like Approved, Rejected) which can be updated manually in SP, Power App or via flow. But in that case, you will need to handle the special scenarios I mentioned above.

Hope that helps!

[perksyaus]

Thank you for the reply Sudeep :  I think my flow will be like this:

When a new entry goes into my sharepoint list

approval process starts 

I update my list with a 'sent for approval'

approval waits

then when approval is accepted I will update my list with an 'approved'

I think what I wanted to avoid was having 20 flows sitting there waiting for approvals - but it seems that I cannot initiate an approval in one flow, and then act on the same approval in another flow - I just thought the approval id might be somewhere I could access

Thanks

Denise

[SudeepGhatakNZ · Accepted solution]

Hi Denise,

The out-of-the-box actions wouldn't let you access an approval task from another flow.

The approvals get saved in Dataverse and can be accessed using Dataverse connectors as shown below.

https://sudeepghatak.com/cancel-approval-tasks-in-flow/  (See option 2) 

However, I would stay away from working directly with Dataverse tables unless there is a very good reason.

[perksyaus]

Thanks Sudeep - really appreciate your insight

I will use the approval process as per the intentions and see how it goes

Thanks

Denise