How to use Approval Templates in Power Automate

Introduction

MSFT Power Automate has made the approval process much simpler and with more customizations done. The good thing is this process can be set up in just minutes using the templates. In the initial days, the same process to build, set up and configure took at least a couple of weeks. In this article, let's go through the simple steps to set up the approval process for a SharePoint document library. My use case is to have the approvals done for a single document, which every approver must approve.

• If everyone approves only, then the final status is marked as ‘Approved’.
• If anyone rejects, then the final status is marked as ‘Rejected’.

Pre-Requisites

• You need to have a Power Automate subscription with M365 licenses E1, E3, E5, etc, either from your organization or from your developer tenant.
• Your account needs to have minimum contribute permissions to the Document Library.

Steps

Please follow the below steps to set up the approval process for a specific SharePoint document library.

Step 1. Go to the document library, and click on the horizontal ellipses and click on ‘Integrate’.

Step 2. Click on the option ‘Power Automate’ --> ‘Create a flow’.

Step 3. There will be an option to select from a list of templates; click on ‘See more’.

Step 4. Look for the template that says ‘Request approval (everyone must approve) for a selected file.

Step 5. A new window will open, and you will be prompted with the information below. It says that the flow will connect to the required actions using the account that is currently logged in. Once the actions and connection are validated, click on ‘Create a flow’.

Step 6. That’s it. You should get a message that the flow is ready to go. Click on ‘Got it’.

The above steps complete the setup of the approval process for the selected documents in the document library using the predefined Power Automate templates. As you can see, we haven’t designed or configured the flow; instead, we followed the screen prompts to set up an approval flow.

Testing

Please follow the below steps to test the flow that was set up using the previous section.

Step 1. Go to the document library, select a document where the approval process needs to be done, and click on ellipses --> Automate --> Request approval (everyone must approve) for a selected file.

Step 2. A window will be opened asking to ‘run the flow’. Validate the connection and click on ‘Continue’.

Step 3. Fill in the required fields and click on ‘Run Flow’.

• Request
• Approvers

Note. Approval reminders are ‘OFF’ by default. The catch here is even though you don’t want reminders, you still must enter the Reminder Duration and Reminder Duration Unit.

Step 4. You are prompted with a modal dialog that the approval process is started.

Step 5. Once the approval process finishes, the final email will be sent to the requestor who initiated the approval process. Below is the screen capture for reference.

You may choose to configure/enhance the approval flow to meet your needs.

Conclusion

Thus, in this article, we have seen how to use the predefined Power Automate template and configure it to the SharePoint document library using simple follow-up prompts.