Introducing Custom Response Options for Approvals

Approvals in Flows empower you to automate requesting and tracking approvals.

With custom response options, you can now create approvals with responses tailored specifically to your business needs. Use custom responses to provide granular feedback for content reviews (E.g.: Approve, Approve with edits, Reject), respond to an approval to offer discount with discount limits (Up to 5%, Up to 10%, Up to 15%, Denied), and more!

Create an approval with custom responses

Let’s say we want to send an approval request each time a proposal is uploaded to a SharePoint folder, and allow the approver to respond with one of three options: Accept, Accept with edits, Reject.

To do this, begin by adding an action that starts an approval, just as you do today.

Next, select one of the two ‘Custom Responses’ options in the Approval type dropdown.

Lastly, specify your custom response by filling in the ‘Response options item’ field. To add another custom response option, click the ‘Add new item’ button.

Leverage approval responses

Based on the outcome of the approval request, we might want to do different things. For instance, if the outcome of the request is Accept/Reject, move the proposal to a folder for accepted/rejected proposals, but if it is Accept with edits, send an email to notify the author to make changes to the proposal.

To do this, add a Condition or a Switch action, pick the ‘Outcome’ field of the approval request from the dynamic content picker and check whether the value equals Accept, Accept with edits and Reject respectively.

 

Respond to approval requests with a custom response

Responding to an approval with custom response options is no different from responding to Approve/Reject approvals. Head on over to the Approval center in Flow, or the actionable email and pick your response