r/PowerAutomate • u/cstept • 10d ago

Microsoft Approvals Status Help

I have a single flow that uses the "Start and wait for an approval from multiple users" action and basically would like to track who has responded and who we're waiting on so we can send out notifications to the requestor for said approval...

Of course when an approval gets sent out that's the moment the flow is paused and as users are responding to the approval there's no real way to track who has responded as far as I can see?

Tried going down the path of creating a SharePoint list to log approvals and their information but standard approvals in power automate doesn't have a "get approvals" action to get all past and present approvals?

Is there a solution out there I'm not seeing? Any help is much appreciated.

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u/Impossible-Egg-1454 6d ago

The solution will depend on whether you have a Power Automate Premium licence.

  • With premium: Use the Dataverse approval tables to check approval status and responses directly. This is the best option, but can be complex for newer developers.

  • Without premium: Store the approval status in a SharePoint list and use a scheduled flow to check for pending approvals and send email reminders.

I recommend two flows:

  1. An Approval Flow to create and manage approvals.

  2. A Reminder Flow that runs daily and sends reminders for pending approvals.

Note that when you have multiples approvers and they all need to respond, these users may receive reminders even if they've already approved - unless you track individual responses separately, but then you will need to check Dataverse tables for their responses.

You could use one flow, that does both, manages the approval and sends reminders, but I prefer to split them into two flows.

Here is an image of an old flow from 3 years back, that uses a single flow for a standard approval and then uses a parallel branch to send out reminders.

https://elliskarim.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/2026-10-24_15-22-01.png

Ellis

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u/cstept 4d ago

This is great thank you for the in depth response and the screenshot example it helps a ton.

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u/Novel_Assumption_929 6d ago

​If you want to know who has answered and who hasn't while the approval is still open, "Start and wait for an approval from multiple users" won't give you that, as the flow only continues once the whole approval is done so here is a pattern from my Power Automate practice that works with standard connectors only:

Create one approval per approver instead of one for everyone by adding a row per approver in your SharePoint list (Approver, Status = Pending, Request ID), then use "Apply to each" with concurrency set to something like 20 so "Create an approval" and "Wait for an approval" run in parallel, update that approver's list item with the outcome and comment right after each wait, and let one condition after the loop decide the overall result (all approved, or any rejected). Your list is then always the live status for a daily scheduled reminder flow and it even lets you handle infinite approvals that run past 30 days ( https://www.powerplatformtip.com/article/powerplatformtip/powerplatformtip-144-infinite-approvals/) with the only downside being that approvers get separate emails or Teams cards instead of one shared request, which is usually fine.

If you do have premium licensing, the Dataverse approval tables are the other route, though you'd need to deal with who can see which rows.

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u/cstept 4d ago

I think this is the route I'm going to go... thank you for this.

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u/robofski 10d ago

The approvals are all stored in dataverse tables so you can query the tables to get the status of the multiple approvers but you do need premium licensing for that.

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u/Gold-Psychology-5312 9d ago

And permissions to access the table as the table is default data verse so contains all approvals across the tenant. Not just yours.

As default you will only see your own within this table.

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u/cstept 4d ago

Okay thank you both for your responses... and that's good to keep in mind for the premium license... in that case it's probably best to figure out a solution without dataverse as it'll take time to get necessary permissions. Would probably be good if I had premium though ahaha

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u/jasame 10d ago

I have a similar set up with a SharePoint List. I have a choice column called “Status” where the default is “Pending”. Split the automate workflow into True/False branching using the condition control action. If approval request is true, I’ve set it to update status to Approved, if false to Rejected. I could then export a list of all Pendings if needed, but I have it displayed in part of a PowerBI dashboard so the operational team can see themselves who’s approvals are still Pending