Tutorial

Replace Email Approvals with Power Automate

By Edward Pinela — Microsoft-certified consultant · August 5, 2026

Somewhere in your company right now, a purchase request is sitting in an inbox, and the person who sent it has no idea whose. This tutorial shows how to replace email approvals with Power Automate: one form, one flow, one list — producing routed requests, automatic reminders, escalation, and a complete audit trail, using tools most Microsoft 365 business plans already include.

The anatomy of an approval workflow

Every automated approval has the same four parts: a trigger that captures the request, routing logic that decides who must sign off, an approval action that collects the decision in Outlook or Teams, and outcome steps that notify people and record the result. Build those four deliberately and everything email does badly — lost requests, unclear status, no record — disappears.

Here is how each part upgrades the email version of the same process:

Step 1: Capture the request properly

Start by replacing the free-text email with a structured intake: a Microsoft Form for simple cases, or a SharePoint list form when requests need attachments and status tracking. Capture every field the approver needs to decide — amount, category, vendor, justification — as required fields, so no approval ever stalls on "can you send more detail?"

Create a SharePoint list as the system of record regardless of which intake you choose, with columns for the request fields plus Status, Approver, Decision date, and Comments. The flow will keep this list updated; it becomes your live status board and your audit trail. Teams that outgrow the simple form here often graduate to a small canvas app for intake — our build-vs-buy framework for Power Apps covers when that step is worth it.

Step 2: Build the flow and its routing rules

In Power Automate, create an automated cloud flow triggered by "When a new item is created" on your list (or "When a new response is submitted" for Forms). Add a Condition action for the routing rule — for example, amount under $5,000 goes to the requester's manager, anything larger goes to the manager and then finance, in sequence.

Then add the built-in Start and wait for an approval action for each stage. Choose "Approve/Reject – First to respond" for single approvers or "Everyone must approve" for joint sign-off; multi-stage chains are just these actions in sequence inside your condition branches. Microsoft's approvals documentation (opens in new tab) covers every option the action supports, including custom responses beyond approve/reject. Resist inventing exotic routing on day one: the rules people can already recite are the rules to automate first — the same principle behind our ranking of which business processes to automate first.

Step 3: Add reminders, escalation, and the audit trail

The follow-up machinery is what actually kills approval delay, and email has none of it. Configure the approval action's timeout, then handle the timeout branch explicitly: send a reminder on day two, and reassign or escalate to a backup approver on day four. The requester never has to chase anyone again — the flow is the one doing the nagging.

After the decision, close the loop in both directions: update the SharePoint item with the outcome, decision date, and approver comments, and notify the requester in Teams or email. Because every run writes back to the list, your audit story changes from "search three mailboxes and hope" to filtering one list — who approved what, when, and why, with nothing reconstructed from memory. Finance and compliance reviews get shorter in direct proportion.

Step 4: Test with real approvers, then go live

Before rollout, run the workflow against real historical requests with the actual approvers involved: a normal case, a rejection, an out-of-office delegation, and a timeout that escalates. These four scenarios expose almost every wiring mistake. Fix what surfaces, document the flow's rules, and switch the team over on a named date — with the old email path explicitly retired.

Two production notes worth stealing: own the flow's connections with a service account rather than a personal login, so the workflow survives staff changes; and write the routing thresholds in a place admins can edit without opening the flow. If you'd rather have all of this built for you, our fixed-fee Power Automate consulting delivers scoped approval workflows in a typical 2–4 weeks with 30 days of hypercare — tell us about your approval process and we'll scope it. For choosing the platform itself, our Power Automate vs Zapier comparison explains why teams already on Microsoft 365 usually build approvals here, and Power Automate licensing for small business sets out which approval workflows stay inside the rights you already hold. And if your approval gate is a conflict check rather than a spending threshold, the sequence and the record-keeping change — our Power Automate consulting for law firms covers matter intake, conflicts clearance, engagement letters and prebill review specifically.