Microsoft has recently introduced Approvals to Flow. This functionality provides users with an easy way to look at all their outstanding approval requests and action them.
But what if you don’t know that you have pending approvals? In this article, I provide an example how to receive time-based reminders of an outstanding approval until it has been actioned. In my example, I created a SharePoint list for vacation request that need approvals. The vacation requests have a requester, approver, start and finish date, and approval status. When the approval is first created, the Approval Status is set to Pending. (NOTE: Due to a current limit in the Flow functionality, I am leveraging a text field for the Approval Status rather than a choice field or other structure data).
Once a vacation request has been submitted, the flow kicks off. Let’s have a look at how it works.
The flow is broken into three major sections
Flow Initiation
During the initiation of the flow, information is captured about the vacation request, such as the name of the requester and approver. As well, I create a variable Approval Provided, which I use later to determine whether approval has been provided or is still pending.
The next two sections run in parallel branches.
Flow Approval (right branch)
In this section, I submit an approval to the approver mentioned in the SharePoint Vacation Request list item. As this step is synchronous, the right branch will pause until the approval step has been completed by the approver by either approving or rejecting the vacation request. Once an action has been performed, the original SharePoint Vacation Request list item is updated with the corresponding Approval Status.
Reminder (left branch)
The left branch is responsible for sending out email reminders to the approver. The trigger is time based and continues until the Approval Provided variable is set to true (which happens in the Flow Approval branch). To make things easier for the approver, I am including a link to the Flow Approvals page (https://flow.microsoft.com/manage/environment/<your tenant ID>/approvals/received) directly in the email message.
Caveats
There are a couple of caveats with this approach. The first one is that you cannot target a specific approval for your user. If the user has several approvals outstanding, you will need to be creating in your messaging to ensure that they address the correct one. For example, in my email message above, I have included the approval type (Vacation Request), who requested it, and start and end dates. These can be matched to the Approval information.
The second caveat is that unless you put a limit on the reminders, they will continue until the approval has been actioned. This can possibly a point of annoyance if someone is away for some time and comes back to find a long list of approvals in their mailbox.
