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Parallel approval without waiting for all approvers

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Posted on by DH-26091348-0

Dear all,

I'm new in Power Automate and after following some learn path and exercise, I'm trying now to create my 1st "real life" workflow.

My objective is to build a workflow to validate Purchase invoices in Business Central.

I found templates for that and started from there. The basic process is working fine.

The 2nd phase is to have members of a group to validate these invoices in parallel and not waiting on each others.

I found several entries in this forum as well as an article about such solutions. Therefore using parallel branches, I could achieve my point.

You may say that I could have used the Approval Type "Everyone must approve"...but here come my issue.

I have to meet following conditions:

If any of the group member rejects the approval then it should be immediately rejected without waiting on others (a kind of first to respond)
If 2 group members approve the approval it should be immediately approved without waiting on the 2 remaining members

I found some clues to fix point 1 by including a Terminal control in each branches, but I have no idea how to achieve point 2.

I though about incrementing a variable after each approval but I don't see how to just to approved state once the variable reach 2 as value.

By the way, I asked Copilot would configured an Approval Type to Parallel with some parameters like max approvers...but unfortunately these are not supported.

Any advise would be more than welcome.

David

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Building flows

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ran_dale 71 on at

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Hi David,

To achieve the "first to 2" condition, where approval happens as soon as 2 members approve without waiting for the others, you'll need to use a combination of counters and conditional logic.

Below a possible approach:

Create an Approval Count Variable

Introduce a variable in the workflow to keep track of the number of approvals.

Increment the Variable

After each approval from a group member, increment this variable by 1.

Check the Count

After each increment, check if the value of the variable equals 2.
If the count equals 2, then immediately trigger the approval workflow completion and skip any remaining branches

Hope this helps!

~Dale

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David_MA 12,966 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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You would need to test this, as I am not sure if this would even work. Try this:

Create an integer variable named Approvals and set the default value to 0.

Create an integer variable named Rejections and set the default value to 0.

Add a Do Until action and have it run until it meets this condition: @or(equals(@{variables('Rejections')},1), equals(@{variables('Approvals')},2)

Then set up the approvals as you describe in parallel.

Use a switch after each approval on the outcomes and then increment either the Approvals or Rejection variable by 1 after a response is received. Your flow will look something like this, but with a switch under each of the approvals:

The potential issues I see:

Will the Do until actually proceed when it meets the condition even though there could be approvals still pending?

If it does continue, then how do you cancel the pending approvals?

What happens if you get two approvals, but after you get the two, someone else rejects it? Does that not matter?

You may want to check out Reza Dorrani's YouTube channel at Power Platform Training & more with Reza Dorrani Channel Memberships (youtube.com). He has made a number of videos on approvals with different scenarios, and he might have one that covers your use case.

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DH-26091348-0 2 on at

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Thank you very much for you feedback and proposals.
I will try them out and let you know if it works.

@Dale, how would you do this part?

If the count equals 2, then immediately trigger the approval workflow completion and skip any remaining branches

Regards

David

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