Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Objective: I have the below requirements and I need to come up with a solution that is the lowest in terms of license cost, yet, easy to build and maintain.

Requirements:

Anyone in the organization can access a form, like an Invoice with multiple line items, and submit the form for approval. The form can be raised on behalf of another used within the organization.
The approvers are going to be a single user or a group of users and can be re-assigned (delegation).
The forms can be approved/rejected or sent back to the requester for more information.
The form can have additional comments/attachments as and when it passes through each approver.
The approval workflow in certain stages is dependent on the Invoice value (if above X, by pass person A else go to person B, etc.)
The user can track all the requests they have raised along with the status.

Solutions I could think of:

A complete model-driven application with dataverse to store the data. I believe licensing will be an issue since I need to allow access to any user in the organization given that the main form will also be on model-driven framework.
A canvas app with sharepoint list in the background to manage the data. However, I need to manually build stage-gate approval process and logic and manually build the request approval screens for each user. Minimal licensing cost of all the solutions.
A canvas app for users to send form request and track their requests. This will be stored in shared point list. I will use power automate to push this data into dataverse. The approvers will have a model-driven application to do their approvals. Here, I have a problem of trying to sync the data especially when the approvers can add more comments. I will need to keep pushing the data between Sharepoint <-> Dataverse so that the canvas app can read from sharepoint and when something happens on the canvas app, I need to push it back to dataverse. Licensing is only applicable to the approvers in this scenario and the approvals is taken care of the model-driven application.

I am open to more suggestions and ideas.

Categories:

General Questions

Why do approvers have to have a Model driven app to do their approvals?

I promise you you only need

1. SharePoint

2. Power Automate

3. Canvas App

4. (additional option) Teams for Approvals, which also shouldnt add to your costs if you already have licenses. Not required but another option. I didnt use this on purpose due to my customers need to ... well. not do it this way ;-)

for all of what you said and none of that should cost you more at all or much since depending on your Office licensing the Power Apps License might already be there and SharePoint connector is free and SharePoint is standard for most companies.

I just built an entire process out similar to yours that I designed for them on the fornamed 3 platform technologies