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Home / Business & Management / Business Technology / Dynamics 365: Working with Power Platform Automation / Overview of Approval Flows

Overview of Approval Flows

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In this topic, we’re going to look at building approval flows. Approval flows are useful for coordinating approval in a business process across one or more different individual parties, making it easy to reach not only people that are using the power platform application but those outside of it in our organisation that might be involved in the approval cycle of a business process that we’re building applications for. So these can be used for getting timely approvals of discounts, escalations, or any other approval scenario and oftentimes can make a big difference in speeding up the closure of that transaction. You can use flow to help coordinate approvals with one or more users inside the organisation.
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And it is something that is limited to use inside the organisation so the user has to have an Azure Active Directory account that can be coordinated with to do the approval process. Approval requests can be formatted to include key information allowing a user to quickly make a decision oftentimes only by the information included in the approval request. You could include, for example, how much the customer had spent that year in addition to how much discount they’re wanting, making it so its user doesn’t have to go digging to add up all the prior sales that they’ve done for that year when making a decision. Users are notified that there’s approval available to them.
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They can do that from the email that they receive, or they can go to the approval centre and process all pending approvals that they have queued up. Let’s talk about some of the patterns that you can use for different types of approvals. The first is a single approval. This is straightforward. I want to send it to a single person. They need to approve it. And it’s only one party involved in the approval cycle. Sequential approval, I might have multiple approvals that I queue up together starting one and as that level gets approved moving on to the next for that additional one. And then, finally, parallel approval, where I might send it out to multiple parties that need to review it.
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And I can make a decision. Is any one person able to approve it? In other words, I send it out to five people. But as long as one of those five approve it, it’s OK. Or I can make all five have to approve it unanimously in order to proceed ahead. This is all packaged up in a convenient action that you can use called Start Approval. Start Approval basically takes the approval type, whether it’s any one from the assigned list or all from the assigned list, the title that will show up, so in this case, approve idea. And I’ve dynamically bound it to the name of the idea giving the context.
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And then the Assigned To, which is the single party that I want to approve it or a list of people that I want to approve it, and based on the approval type, it will either require one or all of them to approve. Requestor is who is asking for this approval to happen. By default, it defaults to your user that’s running the flow. And then the Details– this is where you can provide markup to ritually describe the data that you’re asking the user to make an approval on. In this case, I’m providing the description of the idea.
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But I could also go retrieved other information and packaged it all up nice and front and centre so the user doesn’t have to even dig into the application. In fact, because these can go to users that don’t even have access to the application, it’s a way to pull them into the overall process without having to have them become users that know how to use the application. You can also provide a link back to the item launching the application, a model-driven app or Canvas app that they could dig in deeper and rummage around on the related records as needed to make the approval. Now let’s talk about some of the use cases for approval. I’ve already hinted at some of them.
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You can combine when a record is selected with an offer for on-demand approvals. So I might be in a model-driven application. I want to get a discount approved on the particular opportunity. I could have a flow that runs when a record is selected like we talked about in the triggering section of the CDS records. And we could then have that flow use a Start Approval to build the request for the discount that we want to apply to that record. I’ve talked about this a few times. But it is also a way that we can extend that approval outside of the power app’s users.
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This is important because oftentimes this helps you work around some licencing restrictions or empowering other users, maybe legal professionals, finance professionals, that don’t spend their time in the sales applications or other financial applications that our users are using, and allow us to bring those to them in the environments, email, or the approval centre where they don’t need to run the full application. Another important aspect is approval can be data driven from CDS. Oftentimes, this can be like when a record is selected by the user triggering it. But using the triggers when a record is created or when a record is updated, you can kick off an approval process.
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For example, when credit limit increase is requested, you could automatically have that trigger the approval process for the additional credit and apply the update once the approval has all been completed. Because the approval process plugs into the flow, you have all the constructs of flow, all the conditionals, all the use of all the other connectors, to build the approval process in a custom way to meet your particular approval scenario. In the hands-on lab in this topic, you’ll be able to actually go through and build your own approval process.

Approval flows are useful for coordinating approval in a business process across one or more different individual parties.

This makes it easy to reach not only people that are using the Power platform application. However, those outside of it in our organisation that might be involved in the approval cycle of a business process that we’re building applications for.

These can be used for getting timely approvals of discounts, escalations, or any other approval scenario and oftentimes can make a big difference in speeding up the closure of that transaction.

You can use Flow to help coordinate approvals with one or more users inside the organisation. And it is something that is limited to use inside the organisation, so the user has to have an Azure Active Directory account that can be coordinated with to do the approval process.

Approval requests can be formatted to include key information, allowing a user to quickly make a decision oftentimes only by the information included in the approval request.

Another important aspect is that approval can be data-driven from CDS. Oftentimes this can be when a record is selected by the user triggering it, but using the triggers when a record is created or when a record is updated, you can kick off an approval process.

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Dynamics 365: Working with Power Platform Automation
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