What is the best way to make use of majority approval in Microsoft Power Automate?

Speed up the process of approvals by making use of the majority approvals advanced feature in Power Automate. 

You will find that when you go to automate approvals within Power Automate, the two options you are presented with are: 

• Everyone must approve 

OR 

• First to respond 

This is great in theory, however sometimes they aren’t helpful in helping to meet the needs of a business. In the situation where you are looking to get approval for an SLA and you are looking to get an approval from most users, or you find that some approvers are away or are working on other projects, you may find a majority approval may work best. 

The out of the box approval processes become problematic in the cases where people are otherwise engaged whether they are on annual leave or working part time or have more important priorities. When a whole host of users are required to approve content for documentation or a holiday request, waiting for all users to respond can hold up important decision making or even cause timeouts if it takes over 30 days. 

How do you create a majority approval? 

To help solve the above issues which goes far past the out-of-the-box functionality for approvals is to create a solution that enables you to use majority approval. This will remove the two generic options given above as it is possible to create a bespoke process that allows you to integrate a majority approval and within a certain time period before the process goes back to the user or further action is needed. Better still, if one of the users rejects the request as part of the majority, a Power Automate Flow can be used to send a notification to the requesting user to highlight this. 

Let’s begin with the approval processes that come as part of Power Automate, the solution seeks responses from individuals over a set time period, before calculating and reviewing that the overall conditions of the majority process have been completed. 

The best thing about this is the fact that the approval group can be dynamic meaning that it can come from an Office 365 Group or even a SharePoint list. From the list, Power Automate will be able to calculate the minimum number of users required for the majority approval process to be met. The majority required can be set by the user and timescales can be added as part of the process to make sure all the required actions are done as quickly as possible. 

Taking this one step further, once the calculated period has elapsed, further actions can be automated if important documentation or the request is not completed in the designated time period. Therefore, any delay in the approval process to meet the SLA could be flagged up where necessary. 

Conclusion 

It goes without saying but Microsoft Power Automate is a powerful solution with intuitive functionality and the flexibility required to build bespoke automations tailored to your specific business needs. Using this solution to create a bespoke majority approval process helps to give added advantages over the out-of-the-box approval process. 

Next Steps? 

If you are a business that is looking to get a majority approval process setup through Microsoft Power Automate or are looking to find out more about how the Microsoft Power Platform can help to transform your business then please give us a call today. 

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