Approval bottlenecks cost more than patience. These six workflows show what Power Automate handles quietly in the background.
4 min read · 2 September 2026
Approvals are where work goes to wait. A request lands in an inbox, the approver opens it days later, and everyone downstream builds in a buffer because they know the process is slow. The cost shows up as late starts, last minute rushes and a running joke about chasing. Power Automate approval flows change all of that by carrying the request to the right person, chasing it when it stalls and keeping a full trail of every decision. Here are six examples that produce real time savings.
A Power Automate approval flow starts with a trigger: a form submission, a new SharePoint list item, an email. The flow then creates an approval request, sends it to one person or a whole group, and waits. When someone responds, the flow continues down one branch for approved and another for rejected, updating the source record and notifying everyone who needs to know. The point is that the process holds the memory, not the people. Nothing gets lost in an email thread, and anyone can see where a request sits at any moment. The approval itself stays in one place, so the question nobody likes answering, “who has it now?”, simply stops coming up.