Approving a request in Business Central workflows

Approval workflows in Business Central route a document — a purchase order over a certain amount, a general journal, a new vendor — to the right person before it can be posted or released. The rule itself is set up once by an administrator; day to day, most users only ever interact with two screens: sending something for approval, and approving or rejecting what lands on their desk.

Where it lives

Requests to Approve (search Alt+Q) is the approver's inbox. From the requester's side, the Send Approval Request action appears directly on the document — purchase order, sales credit memo, journal batch — once it's configured for approval.

Steps: sending something for approval (requester)

1. Finish the document as normal — fill in the purchase order, journal, or whatever is subject to approval.
2. Use Send Approval Request (or Send for Approval) from the document's ribbon. If the document doesn't meet the workflow's trigger condition (below a dollar threshold, say), nothing happens because no approval is required — it simply proceeds as normal.
3. Wait for the response. The document is typically locked from further editing while the request is open.
4. Check status any time via the document's Approvals action, which shows who it's currently waiting on.
5. If rejected, review the approver's comment if one was left, correct the document, and resend.

Steps: approving or rejecting (approver)

1. Open Requests to Approve. Each line shows the document type, requester, amount (where relevant), and how long it's been waiting.
2. Open the underlying document directly from the request line to review it in full before deciding — don't approve from the summary line alone if the amount or vendor is unfamiliar.
3. Approve, reject, or delegate. Use the corresponding action; a rejection can (and usually should) include a comment explaining why.
4. Confirm it's gone from your list. Approved or rejected requests move to history, viewable via Approval Entries if you need to check something later.

What you need

Anyone who creates documents subject to approval needs no special permission beyond normal document-creation rights — sending for approval is part of the standard flow, not an extra licence feature. Being set up as an approver is a configuration step an administrator does when building the workflow; check with them if you believe you should be receiving requests but aren't. Check current licensing for the Business Central plan your company holds if Power Automate–based approval flows (rather than the built-in engine) are in use, since those route through a Power Automate connection that may have its own licensing note.

Limits and gotchas

• No workflow configured means nothing to approve. If Send Approval Request does nothing visible, the document type or amount may simply not be in scope for any workflow — check with your administrator before assuming something is broken.
• Locked documents aren't stuck forever. Cancelling the approval request (if you're the requester, or in some setups an administrator) unlocks the document again.
• Approval chains can have more than one step. A large purchase order might need two approvers in sequence — approving your step doesn't necessarily mean the document is now fully approved.
• Notifications are not guaranteed instant. Depending on setup, email or Teams notifications for approvals can lag; checking Requests to Approve directly is the reliable fallback if something feels overdue.

A few habits that keep approvals moving

Approvers who let requests sit for days create a bottleneck the requester has no way around — they can't post, can't proceed, and often can't even tell whether the request reached the right person. If you're regularly the approver on a workflow, checking Requests to Approve at least once or twice a day (not just when a notification happens to catch your attention) keeps work flowing for everyone downstream of your decision. On the requester's side, a document that keeps getting rejected for the same reason — a missing dimension, a vendor that needs updating first — is worth raising as a pattern with whoever owns the workflow rather than something to just keep resending and hoping it clears eventually.

Purchase orders are the document type approvals show up on most often — see How to create a purchase order in Business Central for the document itself, and Editing Business Central data in Excel if you'd rather review a batch of pending requests in a spreadsheet than one at a time on screen.