What is Actions

Actions are what you want to happen when a trigger is invoked. For example, the new email trigger starts the action of creating a new file on OneDrive. A typical Power Automate flow has multiple actions.

Now that we introduced you to triggers and actions, let’s examine how they’re used together when you create a flow. In this example, we examine purchase order approval. Approvals are often processes that are done manually but could easily be done with a Power Automate flow.

An organization can easily create a purchase request app using Microsoft Power Apps. Users who need to purchase something would initiate the purchase order process by going into the Purchase Order Power App creating a purchase order (PO) request. In those instances, the trigger would be the user selecting a submit button on the power app. Once the request is submitted, the information is sent to a Power Automate flow.

It is at this step that the actions come in. The flow’s first action is to identify the manager of the user who initiated the PO request. In this case, the flow is using a Microsoft 365 connector to retrieve the user’s manager automatically from Azure AD. Next it creates an approval request in Microsoft Teams. The approval request is assigned to the manager who was identified in the Get manager action.

The image shows an example of the starting point of the flow:

Often, organizations have different procedures to support different types of scenarios. For example, a company might have a policy where purchase requests for more than $10,000.00 need to be sent to a Vice President before they can be completed. This logic can be easily built into a flow using conditions. In this case, after the manager receives the approval request and approves it, the flow includes a condition to see if the value of the request is for more than $10,000.00. If it is, there’s another action to send an approval to the VP in Microsoft Teams. If the item is less than $10,000.00, then the item is officially approved and the request is submitted.

The image provides a high-level example of what that flow may look like.

Even though this flow has many decision points, each of the decisions is handled without needing to write any code. Once the flow is activated, it handles purchase order requests automatically. The approval process becomes part of your users’ daily activities.