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Multi level Approvals Best Practice

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Posted on by S-Hyde

I am working on an approval flow which I have done many times before, but I am currently debating the pros and cons of splitting up the approval flows by the level.

My trigger is when an item gets created/modified in a SharePoint list. In the past I have has a yes/no column to trigger the different approval flows be their level. For example, when an item is submitted or updated and the "Level 1 flow trigger" column = Y, start approval flow, if approved, update the SharePoint list's column "Level 2 flow trigger" which triggers a separate flow for the level 2 approvals.

I am debating if it would be better to have 1 dynamic approval flow that constantly gets triggers when an item in list is modified (with some trigger conditions) instead of splitting them up. Would there be any potential cons to having 1 dynamic flow versus multiple flows. I can see the pros being that one 1 flow needs to be created and managed but I wonder if there could be a potential issues with throttling, ect.

I would love to hear about any additional suggestions or best practices you use when setting up approval flows.

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Building flows

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Pstork1 68,697 Most Valuable Professional on at

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The biggest problem with one overall Approval flow is time. Flows can only run for 30 days. So if you have a flow with multiple levels of approvers and each approver takes a few days to a week the flow can easily time out before all approvals are finished.

Complexity of the logic is another issue. The more levels you have the more complex the overall logic needs to be. This can make it difficult to get the flow to do exactly what you want.

Finally, there is the issue of what to do if one level rejects. Does the overall process restart? do you go back one level? This logic is difficult in a single flow.

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S-Hyde 7 on at

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Thank you for your input.

There would only be 1 approval step within the flow and the approver and content would change depending on information from the SharePoint list through the use of if statements. Each approval level would be a different run of the same flow so each approval would have the full 30 days.

My idea was that only 1 flow would need to be managed but I agree the logic would be more complex than splitting it out into different flows for each approval level.

For performance, is it best to create multiple simpler flows?

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Pstork1 68,697 Most Valuable Professional on at

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I was comparing one flow with multiple approval steps vs multiple approval flows with one step when I talked about complexity. I agree that one Approval flow that changes who the approver is but runs multiple times is a good solution in your case.

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