How to record proof of an approval?

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Posted on by Eric6

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Hi,

In my organization I've created an approval flow with several steps of successive approvals.

How can I record evidence of the approval for future audit?

Before, without using flow, I would have saved the approval emails received. However, with flow the response is not in the form of an email, of course.

I'm thinking about recording the approver email and the time stamp in a SharePoint list. However, this really only proves that my flow marked something as approved. It does not show any evidence that this was triggered by the correct approver from their account...

Best regards,

Eric

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nbuttery 14 on at

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It depends! There are many ways to do this:-
Is the data your users are approving in a SP list or library?
If in a library, do you have Content Approval switched on? (You can intercept this with Flow)
Are you using the actual 'Start & wait for an approval' action in PA? If you are then an audit would pass. Because even if your system account is recording the results in a list, you can prove that 'Bob' hit the approve button along with time and date.

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Eric6 118 on at

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Hi @nbuttery ,
Thanks. If there are many ways, I hope I find one that fits.
My data is in the form of a SharePoint list (with attachments), not a library. So the content approval does not apply, I suppose.
However, I am using the "Start and wait for an approval" action for all the approvals which should then enable the second idea you had.
How can I prove that "Bob" hit the button? The flow runs get deleted after 30 days... You mean I just save the email address and time in a list that only takes input from my flow and is secured against any other input? I think that could work... Of course, it would be more impressive to prove that Bob was logged in with a particular IP address or something. It's not so impressive to just save the email address of the approver in a list. After all, I need the email address to request the approval in the first place.

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nbuttery 14 on at

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Actually you can turn on content approval in a list as well.
It's in versioning just like a library and you can intercept with PA the same way.

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