Microsoft Teams Approval Tracking: Complete Admin Guide

Approval tracking in Microsoft Teams runs through the built-in Approvals app, which collects every request you have sent or received into a single hub with a status, an owner, and a history. Behind that hub sit two different stores: Microsoft Dataverse holds the request record, and Microsoft Forms holds the responses.

Quick fix: Open Teams, select View more apps (…), search for “approvals,” and open the Approvals app — then pin it for one-click access. Inside, the Sent tab shows requests you raised and their status, and the Received tab shows what is waiting on you.

What is approval tracking in Teams, and where does the data live?

The Approvals app is available as a personal app to every Microsoft Teams user, built to make requests traceable rather than buried in chat threads. Microsoft frames it as a compliance surface, not just a convenience feature:

“The Approvals app provides a simple way to bring auditing, compliance, accountability, and workflows to both structured and unstructured Approvals in Teams.” — Microsoft Learn, Manage the Approvals app in Microsoft Teams

The first approval created from the app triggers provisioning of the Approval solution in your tenant’s default Microsoft Dataverse environment. Approvals created from a template store data such as their title, details and template ID in Dataverse, while responses submitted on the request are stored in Microsoft Forms. That split matters when you scope retention or troubleshoot a broken template.

What approval types does Teams support?

The underlying Power Automate action — Start and wait for an approval — documents the types below. Note the last one: sequential approval is the type most structured sign-off chains actually need, and it is routinely left out of older guidance.

Approval type	How it works	When to use it
Approve/Reject - Everyone must approve	All approvers get Approve or Reject. A response is needed from each approver; following actions run after all approvers respond, or when a single rejection occurs	Sign-offs that need full consensus
Approve/Reject - First to respond	Approval or rejection by any approver completes the request	Time-sensitive decisions
Custom Responses - Wait for all responses	You define the options approvers choose from; all approvers must respond to complete the process	Structured feedback beyond approve/reject
Custom Responses - Wait for one response	You define the options; a response from any approver completes the process	Quick group polling
Sequential approval	Approvals are requested one at a time, in a specific order. Each approver must respond before the request moves to the next approver in the sequence	Multi-level chains — manager, then finance, then legal

Approvals raised in the app itself work slightly differently from ones you build in a flow: they “trigger directly with the Power Automate infrastructure and don’t require a flow with an approvals action” (Microsoft Learn). You only need a flow when you want custom pre-approval or post-approval actions.

What license do you actually need?

This is where most tenants over-provision. The approvals connector is a standard connector, so as Microsoft puts it, “any license that grants access to Power Automate and the ability to use standard connectors is sufficient to create approval flows” (Microsoft Learn). Power Automate, Office 365, and Dynamics 365 licenses with built-in Power Automate capabilities all qualify.

Premium licensing only enters the picture when a flow calls a premium connector, and then it depends on the flow type (Power Automate licensing FAQ):

• If an automated or scheduled flow uses a premium connector, only the owner needs a Premium license.
• If an instant flow uses premium connectors, every user who runs it needs a Power Automate Premium license — or you license the flow once with a Process license instead of licensing every user.
• If the flow uses no premium connector, you don’t need Premium at all; a Microsoft 365 license is enough.

Two points worth circulating to your service desk: users who respond to approval requests don’t need a Premium license, and a Microsoft Forms license is required for users who set up new approval templates.

How to find, pin, and enable or disable the app

To open Approvals, select View more apps (…) in Teams, search for “approvals,” and select the Approvals app. If a user cannot see it, the cause is usually administrative: “your Teams administrator likely disabled the app in your tenant.”

Admins control both directions from the Teams admin center:

• Disable or re-enable it org-wide: go to Teams apps > Manage apps, search for the Approvals app, select it, and use the toggle. The app is available by default.
• Pin it for users: use app setup policies — either edit the global (Org-wide default) policy or create and assign a custom one. Users with an F license already get Approvals pinned by the tailored frontline app experience, which is on by default.

How to track and audit approvals

Day-to-day tracking happens in the hub: Sent lists what you asked others to approve, Received shows what is waiting on you, and opening a request shows its comments, actions and timestamps.

For anything that has to hold up in an audit, use the Microsoft Purview portal instead. Sign in, select Audit in the left pane, and under Activities choose the entries under Microsoft Teams approvals activities. The documented event list is granular:

• Created new approval request
• Viewed approval request details
• Approved approval request
• Rejected approval request
• Canceled approval request
• Shared approval request
• File attached to approval request
• Reassigned approval request
• Added e-signature to approval request
• Viewed e-signature request details
• Reviewed e-signature request
• Canceled e-signature request
• Create a new template
• Edit an existing template
• Enable/disable a template
• Viewed template

For deeper coverage, enable and configure auditing in the default environment for the three primary approval entities — Approval, Approval Request and Approval Response. Create, update and delete operations on Approval records are auditable events. If you are building a wider monitoring practice, this pairs with the Microsoft Teams audit log.

One nuance that surprises people reviewing access: a user becomes a viewer of a request simply by being in the chat or channel where it was created, and “they won’t have the ability to take action on the request if they weren’t given that role when the approval was created.” Visibility is not the same as authority.

Building multi-level and sequential chains

Use sequential approval when a request has to pass through people in a defined order rather than everyone weighing in at once. Each approver must respond before the request moves to the next, and the actions after the approval run once everyone in the sequence has responded. Pair it with role-based approval routing when the correct approver depends on the request type rather than a fixed list of names.

The same logic applies to provisioning: sign-off should happen before a new team exists, not after someone reports it. That is what nBold wires into team creation with an approval workflow — the workspace is only provisioned once the configured approval chain clears.

Guest and external approvers: what works and what breaks

You can assign approvals to users “including guest users and Microsoft 365 groups” in your current Dataverse environment or your Microsoft Entra tenant. When you assign an approval to users who are not in your environment, they are automatically given the Approvals User Dataverse security role, which they need for their responses to be processed and persisted in their approvals history.

Three tenant conditions block this outright:

• AllowAdHocSubscriptions is disabled in Microsoft Entra (ask your tenant admin to enable it).
• A security group is used to control which users have access to the Dataverse environment.
• The tenant is on a Power Automate US Government plan.

And one quieter failure mode: guest users who did not accept the B2B tenant invitation “are removed from the approval assignee list and don’t participate in the approval” — with no obvious signal to the requester. Approvers who are set up correctly can respond from an Outlook email, a Microsoft Teams adaptive card, or the Power Automate action center.

Reporting beyond the hub

The hub is built for individual tracking, not for programme-level reporting, so most teams export approval data and chart it in a BI tool for trend views.

The documented programmatic route is the Approvals app API in Microsoft Graph, which “allows you to integrate approval workflows into both Teams app and non-Microsoft apps” and lets you create, update and list approvals. It supports Microsoft Graph subscriptions, so you can send notifications for approval responses, and Microsoft lists tracking and reporting on approval activity as an explicit use case. The exposed resources are approvalItem, approvalSolution, approvalItemRequest, approvalItemResponse, approvalItemViewPoint and approvalOperation.

One caveat that decides whether you can use it: the Approvals app API is documented on the beta endpoint. Treat it as preview tooling rather than a production dependency.

Governance controls worth knowing about

• Conditional Access. Approvals supports Continuous Access Evaluation (CAE), so you can set a Conditional Access policy that restricts a user, app or service from reaching particular resources; once the policy is set, Microsoft Entra ID rejects that entity’s token requests for the resource.
• Data policies. Power Platform data policies act as guardrails on connector access. Block a connector and makers “can’t save their flow or app that uses this connector”; flows that violate a policy are put into a suspended or quarantine state, and connections to a fully blocked connector are disabled. Enforcement is usually within an hour, and at most 24 hours.
• Template ownership and lifetime. All team owners can create an approval template for teams they own. Org-scoped templates share the lifetime of the tenant and team-scoped templates share the lifetime of the team, so permanently deleting a team deletes its templates. The first time an admin creates an org-wide template, Teams creates a Microsoft Entra group containing the tenant’s admins as owners so they can co-manage organizational templates — admins who join later must be added to that group manually.
• The one-month group window. If an admin deletes that Entra group, “you have one month to restore it within the Microsoft Entra admin center to restore all related data.” After a month, or if it is deleted from the recycle bin, the related data is lost. This is a group-restoration window, not a backup of your approval records.
• E-signature providers. Adobe Sign and DocuSign are enabled by default and toggled per provider under Teams apps > Manage apps > Approvals > Settings; each needs its own license from the provider. Disabling a provider also stops users viewing e-signature requests already created with it, and those agreements live in the provider’s own cloud environment.

Documented limits and gaps

Plan around these before you roll out, not after:

• Scale ceiling. “Each team can contain at most 400 approvals templates, and each template can collect a maximum of 50,000 requests based on the current capability in Microsoft Forms” (Microsoft Learn).
• No backups by default. Approvals are stored in the default Dataverse environment, “which doesn’t support backups at this time” (Microsoft Learn). Admins can set custom retention policies on Dataverse tables instead. Data stored in Forms is not deleted until team owners clear it from the Deleted forms tab in the Microsoft Forms web app.
• Everything lands in the default environment. Microsoft lists this as a known issue: “Currently, all approvals are created in your organization’s default environment” (Microsoft Learn).
• Deleting the Form breaks the template. Delete the Form template on the Microsoft Forms site and the approval template breaks — users get a CDB TableNotFound error when they try to open it.
• Not in GCCH or DoD. The feature “hasn’t been released to Government Community Cloud High (GCCH) and Department of Defense (DOD) users yet” (Microsoft Learn).

What’s actually new: AI approvals in Copilot Studio

Microsoft has introduced AI approvals in preview — and it is worth being precise about what that is, because it is a different surface from the Teams Approvals app rather than an upgrade to it. As Microsoft describes them, “AI approvals are intelligent decision-making steps built into multistage approval workflows in Copilot Studio. These steps allow AI to evaluate requests using your business rules and criteria, making consistent approve or reject decisions automatically.”

The scope is narrow: they “are available exclusively in agent flows within Microsoft Copilot Studio,” and agent flows are currently managed in the classic Copilot Studio experience. Nothing here changes how the Teams Approvals hub behaves, so pilot it on its own terms.

FAQs

Where does Microsoft Teams store approval data?

Approvals created from a template store the title, details, and template ID in the default Microsoft Dataverse environment, and responses submitted on the request are stored in Microsoft Forms. The default Dataverse environment doesn’t support backups at this time, and every approval currently lands in that default environment regardless of which environment you would prefer to use.

What license do I need to create and track approvals in Teams?

You need a license for Power Automate, Microsoft 365, or Dynamics 365, plus a Microsoft Forms license if you are building new approval templates. Because the approvals connector is a standard connector, any license that grants standard-connector access to Power Automate is sufficient, and users who only respond to approval requests never need a Premium license.

What approval types does Microsoft Teams support?

The Start and wait for an approval action documents Approve/Reject where everyone must approve, Approve/Reject where the first to respond completes the request, Custom Responses that wait for all responses, Custom Responses that wait for one response, and Sequential approval, which requests approvals one at a time in a specific order.

How do I audit approval activity in Microsoft Teams?

The Approvals app logs audit events in the Microsoft Purview portal, under Audit and then Microsoft Teams approvals activities. Logged actions include creating, viewing, approving, rejecting, canceling, sharing and reassigning requests, attaching files, e-signature actions, and template creation, edits and enable/disable events. For more detail, enable auditing in the default environment for the Approval, Approval Request and Approval Response entities.

Can guest users respond to Teams approval requests?

Yes. You can assign approvals to users including guest users and Microsoft 365 groups, and users outside your environment are automatically given the Approvals User Dataverse security role so their responses are processed and persisted. A guest who did not accept the B2B tenant invitation is removed from the assignee list, and this is also blocked when AllowAdHocSubscriptions is disabled in Microsoft Entra, when a security group controls access to the Dataverse environment, or on Power Automate US Government plans.

What are the hard limits on Teams approval templates?

Each team can contain at most 400 approvals templates, and each template can collect a maximum of 50,000 requests based on the current capability in Microsoft Forms. The default Dataverse environment where approvals are stored doesn’t support backups at this time, and the feature has not been released to Government Community Cloud High or Department of Defense users yet.