Dynamics 365 and Microsoft’s Power Platform allow you to automate tedious tasks and gain time back in your day, while still making sure everything gets done. Creating an Approval Process “flow” is one such task that boosts staff performance and efficiency.  Approval Flows can be used for a variety of different situations — from certification requirements to time off requests.

In today’s blog, we’re going to discuss using Revenue Approvals during the sales process.

Many sales teams that leverage Dynamics 365 configure “business process flows” as sales stages to manage their opportunities, thus allowing staff to track progress and forecast sales metrics.  

In this scenario, the account executive reaches the signing stage of the sales cycle, and they need a manager to approve the deal revenue. Traditionally, they would need to wait for the manager to log into the system and manually approve the revenue for the opportunity, which is inefficient for both the account executive and the manager.

Instead of going through the manual process, you can easily streamline this with Power Automate.

The account executive never has to leave the system; you can add a button to the Business Process Flow, or in this example, the “Sales Process.” The button allows the AE to notify their manager that they finalized a proposal and received a signed contract. This keeps CRM data accurate and acts as a second check.  However, this could also be an automatic process triggered by an action, for example the approval is sent to the manager when the revenue field is filled out. Either way, this step saves the AE time by not having to send a bunch of emails to the manager.

What does this look like for the approver?

The manager is then notified via Teams, email, or both. In this message all the relevant information they need to decide if the opportunity should be approved is present, so they never have to log into the CRM. They can approve, reject, and provide any comments needed right from the email or Teams message.


How is the system updated?

Once the manager responds to the request, CRM and the account executive are updated. If the request is approved, then the Approval field will change to yes and the account executive will receive a notification that the opportunity has been approved. The business process flow can then be advanced, and the opportunity can be closed as Won.


If the approval is rejected, the account executive is notified and receives the attached comments. They then can make the updates suggested by the manager and then press the button again to resend the approval. This allows for maximum communication between the two parties with the minimum amount of effort involved.

This approval flow can be modified and tweaked to do any sort of approval you need. Power Automate offers the flexibility needed to tailor this to your process, without the technical skills usually required for this kind of automation. Overall, the approval process has never been easier for teams using Dynamics 365. Let’s connect briefly to talk about specific ways your team could be using efficiencies like this!


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