Power Automate Approvals Workflow Issues - SharePoint Approval Column

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Posted on by Sean_Perry

I have a running Power Automate Approvals Workflow that is triggered when a user in my Finance Dept uploads a new Invoice to a Sharepoint Site. This SharePoint site is in fact a channel within a Team, and this has caused some unexpected behaviour. Within the Sharepoint site I added a column to indicate the approval status, which updates to Pending when the document is created, then changes when the Invoice is either approved or Rejetced for payment. So far so good.
What I didn't expect is that this column is now applied to the entire Sharepoint site. This has meant that otehr users can now not see doucments unless the document status is changed to approved. Is their a way to make this column only present in the Finance channel, or do I need to create a completely seperate Sharepoint site just for my Approvals workflows?
I want to add a multi-level approval workflow, but want to resolve this issue before going any further.

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Re: Power Automate Approvals Workflow Issues - SharePoint Approval Column

The problem is the way SharePoint is used by Teams. Each Channel in Teams is a folder in the main Documents library that is created in the Team. So any changes to the schema of the list applies to all folders. You can't change the schema for just one folder. One workaround is to create a separate library in the SharePoint site and surface that as a Tab in the channel. Changes to that libraries schema wouldn't affect any other library/folder in the site. But it wouldn't be accessible through the Files tab, only through the new tab you create. Another workaround would be to create a private channel. Private channels generate a completely separate site and library, so again that wouldn't affect the main Files. But Private channels do add some overhead.