Workflow work item approvals in D365 F&O using Microsoft Power Automate/Flow

Possibilities of business processes automation and extension is limitless when you use Microsoft power platform. Use PowerApps to extend user interfaces and functionality of your CRM or ERP apps, use power automate to automate business process actions or use AI builder and RPA to reduce manual labor intensive work for your employees. Dynamics 365 and Power platform together provides the most comprehensive business applications and automation, analytics platform in the market today.

One simple example use case is exposing workflow work items that originate in Dynamics 365 F&O for various business documents such as purchase orders, vendor invoices, budgets, timesheets and expense reports to Microsoft Power automate and then build the required automation flow to take advantage of the Microsoft flow Approvals solution. This gives your employees the flexibility of taking action on critical business documents quicker within Microsoft Teams, or within the Teams app when they are on the go.

I have a very simple flow in place, which is subscribed to the expense report approval business event in Dynamics 365 F&O. Every time an expense report is submitted in F&O and it is ready for the reviewer to take action, the flow will extract the required information from the expense report approval work item using the JSON schema of the business event and then sends an approval action within Microsoft Teams to the approver of the expense report. After the approver takes action on the work item within Teams or on their phone, the work item is completed in real time back in Dynamics 365 F&O.

With this flow actively running, let’s submit an expense report in D365 F&O. The expense report number in this case is 000041.

As soon as the report is processed in the workflow engine of F&O and it gets assigned to the reviewer/approver, the business event is going to notify our Flow. The flow then runs and sends an approval notice to the approval using Flow approvals action.

The approver then gets notified via email as well as in Microsoft Teams regarding the expense report submitted for their review.

Nevertheless, if the approver is using either Power automate or Teams mobile app, they get notified within those apps as well.

The approver can then take the required action (Approve, Reject, Delegate etc.). Let’s assume they approve the expense report in this case.

Now if we go back to Dynamics 365 F&O and check the expense report status, it should be Approved. We can also view the history to validate that this was approved using Microsoft flow.

That was just a very simple demonstration of what is possible . You can apply this to your situation and make more complex business process automation and extensions.

Till next time!!!