Beginner trying to simplify absence forms!

[Bsue]

Hi all, 

I am pretty brand new to Power Automate, but I am trying to build an Absence request form for our Staff members to use that would email different people for approval based on the answer to a question in Forms - i.e. a different manager would approve Discretionary leave to Medical.

I tried using various templates but it seems to get stuck on retrieving the responders email from forms and if I try to do an 'apply to each' like I have seen elsewhere on this forum I have no way of entering 'list of responses' in the parameters. 

Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong? Or has anyone got a suggestion of an easy to build flow that would do what I'm trying to achieve? 

Thanks

[Andrew_J]

@Bsue 

Are the people who complete the form internal or external users or mixture of the two.

Regards,

Andrew

[Bsue]

All internal! 

Thanks!

[Andrew_J]

@Bsue 

Firstly I try and keep things simple, so appolgies if I ramble on or labour a point.

Knowing all the users are internal helps, you will need to make sure they are signed in using their user accounts but you can restrict this in the setting of the form as "only people in my orgaization can respond" so that will get around that.

I think you need to get your organisation chart drawn up first, then decide who needs to report to who as without this on paper you cannot put this into place using FLOW.  And in a public forum like this putting this into the chat would not be good.  A sugestions might be a simple spreasheet in the first instance:

Staff Member	Holiday	Medical
STAFF_01	STAFF_25 email	STAFF_55 email
STAFF_25	STAFF_26 email	STAFF_45 email

I hope you understand the above.  There maybe more headings such as descretionary or the like but I do not want to spend loads of time on this.  The only issue I forsee is what if STAFF_01 wants a hoilday and STAFF_25 is away, you may need another colum for a secodary approver STAFF_??. 

Once you have this I think we can start to look at this for you.  This will not be easy, it is because everyones organstion is different and the realtionships are not the same.  So I can well understand why not templates fitted your needs, not many complicated process like this do.

I will understand if my propsals do not meet your needs.  So please let me know if they dont and I will try and work through with your ideas.

Regards,

Andrew

[Bsue]

Hi Andrew, 

That seems easy enough to set up as a spreadsheet, to clarify, all medical requests would go to say Manager 1, all discretionary to Manager 2, an so on. 

Each staff member who would be filling in this form would belong to a certain department (it's for a school setting). 

Ideally I would want the form to work as follows, although I am not sure if this would be workable:

-Staff fills out request form

-email gets sent to them to confirm the request

-email sent to the relevant manager (either line manager or a designated manager for the type of leave) - ideally with functionality to approve/deny the request

-outcome of approved/denied gets emailed back to staff member as confirmation (and potentially cc'd to their line manager)

I have set up the Form already, and put in the get form responses triggered when a new response is submitted, but this is where I'm getting stuck!

Thanks 

[Andrew_J]

@Bsue 

I know what you want, put some basic table in here for muliple examples and we will go from there.  Can you please share an image of your form, making sure you remove any identification to the organisation.

I have some thoughts already but I need your basic table to inform me so I can best advise.  It would help if you split this down as you have above in STAFF MANAGER. 

Please note I am in the UK so will be able to assist up and till 18:00 today.  It would be good to know which country you are in.

Regards,

Andrew

[Bsue]

Also in UK

Heres a few screen grabs of the Form I have deisgned, I essentially want the 'Type of Leave' to be the deciding factor as to what it does. 

So for the table above, if Staff3 for example requested medical leave it would kick off the process to email Manager 1 for approval and then a confirmation of the outcome to both staff3 and LM1.

Unsure if I'm making sense...

[Andrew_J]

@Bsue 

Wow thanks that helps a lot and I thought you could have been a school from the way this was worded.

The form looks good, only one question on Q6 can this not be a radio button question, for half day, full day.  It would spead up the information entry in my view.

As this will be an aproval process we need somewhere to store the data from the form, so I recomed you setup a SharePoint list with similar headings to Q1 through to Q9.  And incase you do not know keep the spaces in the field to a minimum so Q6 heading would be Time_of_Leave, this will help in the future.  All dates will be dates only no time.  I cannot see any other special types so most of them will be plain text single line apart from Q9 being a multi line. 

You then need to link the form to the SharePoint List, there should be in the templates section of FLOW a flow called "Record form responce to Sharepoint" use this is start.  Hopefully you be able to do this yourself.  But I wil lwarn you there will be a lot of comlications to get over with the muliple field types and writing these to the Sharepoint List.  In the back end of the form there is an excel file, could you download this without any user data in it and and attache this to your next responce as this will help me do some testing my end.

Once the template is setup put though a test enrty on the form, and let me know if you get all green ticks.

We shall stop there.  Again I will say this will not be done today, I see this taking sometime as I will be building this with you in real time. 

Regards,

Andrew

[creativeopinion]

@Bsue Throwing out a suggestion for your form. You could easily get rid of a few form questions by using the users M365 profile.

• Full Name
• Line Manager Email Address
• Department

I would suggest instead of a single field to capture whether it's all day or start/end time you should have a checkbox for All Day. If checked, the start and end time fields could be hidden (I'd do a separate field for the start and end times).

You also don't need the date of request as the flow will be able to capture this when the flow is triggered. 

You might find this YT Tutorial helpful: How to Get a Microsoft Form RSVP Response into a SharePoint List

IN THIS VIDEO:

✅ How to get a Microsoft Form Response into SharePoint

✅ How to get a Microsoft Form ID

✅ How to get a Microsoft Form response

✅ How to Build a Microsoft Form with Conditional Fields

✅ How to used Branching in Microsoft Forms

✅ How to format Microsoft Form multiple choice responses for a SharePoint multi-choice column

✅ How to parse a Microsoft Form multiple choice response as string of text

✅ How to convert a text response to a number

✅ How to use the Switch action

✅ How to create a custom email confirmation for a Microsoft Form submission

✅ How to Create a Custom View in a SharePoint list

✅ How to use the Compose Action

✅ How to write Power Automate Expressions

Hope this helps!

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