Approvals - Send a reminder when an approval have been pending for five days

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Posted on by IB-20031015-0

I'm sorry, I feel that I should be able to find conversation about this topic - but I can't.... bad in search obviously....

I have a document library in SharePoint where I'm using old fashion approvals that I activate under versioning settings.

Now I want to have a flow in Power Automate that sends reminder to Approver if a document has been in Pending for five days.

Challenge - I'm not able to grab information in the column "Approval Status"

Does anyone know if this is possible to do?

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Building flows

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CU11021143-0 50 on at

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SharePoint’s classic Approval Status column is not available in Power Automate, so you can’t read “Pending” directly.
Use a custom status column instead and run a scheduled flow to check items pending for 5+ days and send reminders.

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PowerDeveloperTP 379 on at

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Hello,

The “Approval Status” column in SharePoint document libraries isn’t a normal column. It’s a system field tied to content approval.Internally, it’s stored as : _ModerationStatus (numeric value)

So Power Automate won’t show “Approval Status” by name in dynamic content. The internal _ModerationStatus uses numbers:

0 = Approved

1 = Rejected

2 = Pending

3 = Draft

4 = Scheduled

For your case, you're looking for: Pending = 2

You can build a recurrence flow to get pending documents using Get files (properties only) with Filter Query:_ModerationStatus eq 2

And add condition to check for date : addDays(item()?['Created'], 5) is less than utcNow()

Do you capture approver details in any column?

If so, you can send email using approver details

Thank you.

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IB-20031015-0 3 on at

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Thanks a lot for your answers!

CU11021143-0 - I need to use this column, otherwise it feels like I can't get away from manual work. Mybe I'm wrong 🙏

PowerDeveloperTP - I have a column for approver and can easy catch the email, I will try this, thanks a lot for now! 👍

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Kalathiya 1,568 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Hello @IB-20031015-0,

Yes,It's feasible, Looks like the earlier answer about ModerationStatus returning a number is not quite correct answer.

In Power Automate, SharePoint’s Approval Status (called ModerationStatus) directly returns the status name like Draft, Pending, Approved, etc.

So you don’t need to compare numbers, just compare directly with the status text. For example, check if ModerationStatus equals "Pending", then see if the document has been pending for 5 days, and send a reminder to the approver.

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