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Everyone Must Approve SharePoint Workflow

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Posted on by KB-09011632-0

Hi, all--

I have a "Wait for all responses" workflow setup for Items (requests) in a SharePoint List. I am very much an amateur with Power Automate, so it seems like a fairly complex flow. At a high level, the flow below is sent to one or multiple people and, within the Scope is a Wait for an approval for each individual person. When a person responds, I get a Final Status alert, even if not everyone has responded. The responses are collected and then recorded in an "Approval Status" field on the Item in SharePoint. This happens during the Check the Status Value is Rejected step.

Here's what I would love to do, if fairly easy: right now, I have no visibility of who has responded and their response until after everyone has responded and it is recorded in the Approval Status field. What I would like to do is record each individual response as they are received and while the flow may still be running (waiting for others to respond), yet still wait until the very end to determine the status of the request, which it does today. Essentially, all approvers must approve for the request to be approved. If even one rejects the request, it is rejected.

Any thoughts on if there is a fairly easy way to accomplish this? I was considering adding a variable and a Do Until step in between Create an Approval and Scope?

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David_MA 14,649 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Take a look at this YouTube tutorial. I think this is what you are asking to do: Dynamic Approvers & log history with Power Automate Approvals. I have never attempted this, as where I work, we'd never use the everyone must approve approval type. Approvals where I work always need to escalate to the next level once a lower-level person has approved it first. Therefore, when I send an approval, it always uses first to respond.

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Expiscornovus 33,853 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hi @KB-09011632-0,

How long can it take for all approvers to approve? In the past I have dealt with this but I moved away from the waiting part in the flow setup. Because in some cases you never now how long it will take until every has responded.

Instead I used the approach described by Matthew Devaney, which just uses a create approval to create the approval tasks in one flow and uses a separate flow which keeps an eye on approval results within Dataverse instead.

Added bonus is that this will workaround the 30 day limit : https://www.matthewdevaney.com/extend-a-power-automate-approval-over-the-30-day-limit/

Happy to help out 😁

I share more #PowerAutomate and #SharePointOnline content on my Blog, LinkedIn, Bluesky profile or Youtube Channel

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KB-09011632-0 20 on at

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Thanks for the responses, @David_MA and @Expiscornovus. I'm sure both of the solutions provided would have worked, but I found that the easiest was to simply insert an Update Item step prior to Check Status if No Response that updates the Approval Status field as responses are received. Everything works as expected.

That said, a bit off topic but to @Expiscornovus point/question, I have had flows that run longer than 28 days. And while I'm sure the solution you provided will work, the logic in my flow is to set the Timeout Duration on the Wait for an Approval step to P27D to avoid the 28-day window. If an approval or rejection is received, follow the Success path. If not, follow Catch. Part of the Catch process is to record the status for these individuals as "No Response". This is further down in the flow not shown in the screenshot below.

This has been working but, in doing some testing, I am now getting an error at Wait for an Approval (ActionTimedOut. The workflow action 'Wait_for_an_approval' timed out while waiting for webhook callback.) Any ideas why this may be happening? For testing purposes, I changed the Timeout Duration to PT3M.

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David_MA 14,649 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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How youKB-09011632-0 handle the timeout issues is similar to what I do. Most of my process owners feel 28 days is plenty of time to get an approval. In those situations, if the wait for an approval action times out, I configure the flow to consider that to be a rejection and process it down the rejected path.

Like Expiscornovus. when the approval process can take several months, I just use the create an approval action. Another workflow watches for the completion of the approval and kicks in to process the outcome.

I also have a third method which if the approval times out it cancels the existing approval, calls a child flow, and essentially starts a new approval.

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