Internal requests with approval in SharePoint

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Purchase requests, IT tickets, access requests, expense pre-approvals and equipment orders are the same tool wearing different labels: a form, a queue, someone who decides, and a status everyone can see. Build it once and you can build all of them.

The fastest route is to describe it to Sharelio, the AI platform for building SharePoint tools: “a purchase request tracker with requester, item, amount, cost centre and approval status, showing pending ones first”. In minutes you have the list provisioned in your tenant and a component on the page. Submissions go through SharePoint's own new-item form, and the approver changes the status.

One thing to be clear about before choosing: an approval status is not a workflow. If people must be notified, chased and escalated, that is Power Automate on top of the list — in every route below, including the free one.

Route 1: describe it (minutes)

  1. Describe it: the fields you need and how the queue should be sorted — usually pending first, oldest at the top.
  2. Review it with sample data before publishing. The list is provisioned with the right column types: person for the requester, currency for the amount, choice for the status.
  3. Publish to the page the requesters already visit — not a new site nobody bookmarks.

Give the approver a second view of the same component filtered to pending items. Two components, one list, no duplicated data — which is the pattern that keeps this maintainable as the process grows.

Route 2: a list plus Power Automate (free, more wiring)

  1. Create the list with the columns above and format the status column with JSON so the queue is readable at a glance.
  2. Use the list's own form for submission.
  3. Add a Power Automate approval flow triggered on item creation, writing the outcome back to the status column.

Cost: €0, using connectors included with Microsoft 365. This is genuinely the right answer when notifications matter more than presentation, and it is underused. The friction is that the flow becomes a thing someone owns, and flows built by people who have left are a recognised category of organisational debt.

Route 3: Power Apps (days)

Worth it when the submission is complicated: conditional fields, validation against budgets, multi-step entry, or an approver who needs a phone app. Budget days of a maker's time and check the connector list — anything beyond SharePoint and Outlook likely means premium licensing at roughly €19 per user per month for everyone who opens it, which for a company-wide request form is everybody. See the full Sharelio vs Power Apps comparison.

Frequently asked questions

Can approvers be notified without Power Automate?

Not automatically. A status column tells you the state; it does not send anything. SharePoint alerts can notify on list changes, which covers simple cases, but proper approval routing — notify, remind, escalate, record — is a flow. That is true of all three routes, so it is not a reason to pick between them.

How do we stop people seeing each other's requests?

For sensitive requests, item-level permissions on the list can restrict readers to the creator and the approver group. Be warned that this becomes hard to administer at volume. A common and simpler pattern is a separate list per sensitive process with permissions set at the list level, rather than per item.

Can one tool cover purchases, IT and access requests?

You can, with a request-type column, and it is usually a mistake. The fields diverge, the approvers differ and the retention rules are not the same. Separate lists that look alike are easier to live with than one list with a lot of empty columns.

What does each route cost?

List plus Power Automate: €0 with standard connectors, plus the ongoing ownership of the flow. Sharelio: free on the plan that keeps one component published, then a flat monthly cost per tenant however many processes you build. Power Apps: days of build time, and per-user monthly licensing the moment a premium connector appears.