Power Automate: approval flows people actually use.
Vacations, leave and internal requests without lost emails. What to design before configuring the first flow.
The vacation request is the most common case and the most revealing. In most mid-sized companies it works like this: the employee emails the manager, the manager replies "ok", someone forwards it to HR, and HR types the data into a spreadsheet. When there is an argument about balances months later, nobody can find the evidence.
Power Automate solves the flow, but only if the process was solved first. Four questions have to be answered in writing: who approves each type of request, what happens if the approver does not respond within the defined deadline, who can approve in their absence, and at what point the balance is deducted. If those answers do not exist, the automated flow will reproduce the ambiguity at higher speed.
The typical architecture we implement has three pieces: a capture form, a list or table where each request is stored with its status, and the flow that orchestrates approvals and notifications. The approval reaches the manager by email and in the mobile app, with approve and reject buttons, and the record keeps date, time and person responsible.
A licensing point worth checking before designing: Power Automate includes a set of standard connectors with Microsoft 365 licenses, but some connectors — especially those that access external databases or third-party services — are considered premium and require an additional per-user license. Designing a flow on premium connectors without checking is the most frequent way a project stalls halfway. Confirm with your licensing provider before committing the scope.
Adoption is won in the details. If the form asks for twelve fields when four would do, people go back to email. If the notification does not clearly say what is being approved and how many days of balance remain, the manager approves without reading. If there is no way to check the status of a request, HR keeps getting calls asking. These three mistakes sink more implementations than any technical problem.
Measuring the result must also be defined up front: average response time, percentage of requests with full traceability, and the number of manual queries the area still receives. Without those three figures before and after, the project cannot be defended to management.