Power Automate - Approval / Rejections / Tracking / Audit

[Ramtin]

Hi,

Our organization is looking into implementing Power Automate but we have a couple of questions hoping someone could answer.

1. When a user approves or rejects a request via e-mail, where does the record go?
   • Does/Can the approval/rejection be attached to the document being reviewed?
   • Is there a log where all the approval/rejects are stored?
2. How are audit logs for approval/rejections documented?
   • Is there versioning or a history for all users besides the history within each individual user profile?
3. What is the recommended way to keep an audit log for a particular document?

thank you

R

[ScottShearer · Accepted solution]

@Ramtin

Flow approvals rely on the CDS (Common Data Service) for approvals.  All information regarding an approval is stored in CDS.  While, technically, you can access that data, to the best of my knowledge doing so is neither officially documented or supported.

For an audit trail, consider writing all approval data to a SharePoint list.  Access to the audit list can be tightly controlled and versioning can be enabled.

[RobElliott · Accepted solution]

Hi @Ramtin, in my company, as @ScottShearer suggested, we save back to the item in the document library the approve/reject decision, the name of the approver, the date of the approval and any comments made in the approval email. That way we have an audit trail of the approval specific to each document. If more than one approver is needed then we use parallel branching and in the document library have the same columns as above but named differently, e.g. Approver2, ApproveDate2 etc.

In the example below we also automatically add a next review date for 6 months ahead and a separate flow runs every day to check which documents needs reviewing and to send it to the approvers.

Come back with further questions about any of this.

Rob

Los Gallardos
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[Ramtin]

thank you for your help. This has helped a lot.

[Ramtin]

Thank you Sir! I really appreciate the screenshot on how to record the decision.

This has made my life much easier, also thank you for offering to answer my questions. I'll be sure to make a post if I run into problems.

much respect.

Ramtin

[ColinM]

Hi, 

I agree there should be a way to see the logs in the Flow Approval page. Like the others here, I write the responses to SharePoint and restrict the visibility & access rights of the fields.  

One item missing from the response here is Approval ID, Approver Tenant ID and the Summary.  These two items add a further layer of audit-proofing for me as they record the Global Unique ID (GUID) of the approval and the person who approved it.  See the text in blue below for output messages. 

Additionally, there is a way to find/display the audit logs through Powershell and other Admin rights portals.  

https://community.dynamics.com/crm/b/crminthefield/posts/monitoring-the-power-platform-power-automat... [And part II]

Turning On/Off Audit logs: 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/turn-audit-log-search-on-or-off?view=o365-...

Approval ID/Approver ID / Summary
Aprv ID: af5****-*****-*****-*****c92d1
Aprvr ID: db***-*******-***-********-****d2

Eastern UTC Approval Time: Tuesday, September 22, 2020
Approval Summary: Approver: Jam***** Ch***********, JCh*****@********.com Response: Approve Request Date: Friday, September 18, 2020 7:42:02 PM Response Date: Tuesday, September 22, 2020 3:04:37 PM

[Ramtin]

thank you! this is a solid idea

[Ramtin]

thank you for the exampls this is very useful