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How to Stop Power Automate from Creating Duplicate Approval Requests

Huma Ashraf Ch Oct 10, 2026 868 views

Question details

The user needs to prevent a Microsoft Power Automate flow from generating multiple identical approval requests when a single form response is submitted.

How to Stop Power Automate from Creating Duplicate Approval Requests

Product: Microsoft Power Automate
Device & OS: not provided
Scenario: Automating an approval workflow triggered by a new Microsoft Forms submission.
Observed behavior: The flow trigger fires multiple times or concurrently for a single submission, causing duplicate approval requests to be sent to the approver.

Before you start

Ensure you have editing permissions for the affected Power Automate flow and can access its run history to verify if the trigger is firing simultaneously.

Solution 1Recommended

Enable Concurrency Control in Trigger Settings

Limiting the trigger's degree of parallelism to 1 prevents multiple flow instances from processing the same form response concurrently, effectively stopping duplicate approvals.

Duplicate requests usually happen because a trigger fires more than once in quick succession, or multiple runs process the same item simultaneously. Enforcing a concurrency limit queues the runs sequentially.

Check Flow Run History

Log in to Microsoft Power Automate, navigate to 'My flows', select your approval flow, and review the 28-day run history to confirm if multiple runs occurred at the exact same timestamp.

Access Trigger Settings

Click the 'Edit' button at the top of the flow details page. Locate your 'When a new response is submitted' trigger, click the three-dot menu icon (...), and select 'Settings' from the dropdown.

Enable Concurrency Control

In the Settings panel, find the 'Concurrency Control' toggle and switch it to 'On'.

Set the Degree of Parallelism

Once Concurrency Control is enabled, move the slider for 'Degree of Parallelism' down to 1. Click 'Done' at the bottom of the panel to apply your changes.

Save and Test the Flow

Click 'Save' in the upper right corner. Submit a test form response to verify that only a single approval request is generated.

Enable Concurrency Control in Trigger Settings

Irreversible Setting: Once you enable Concurrency Control and save the flow, you cannot turn it off. If you need to disable it in the future, you must delete the trigger and recreate it.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Why does my flow trigger twice for one SharePoint item update?

This commonly occurs if the flow itself updates the SharePoint item during the run, triggering another instance. You can prevent this by adding Trigger Conditions in the trigger settings to ignore updates made by the account running the flow.

Will setting concurrency to 1 slow down my automated workflows?

Yes, setting the parallelism degree to 1 means that if multiple form responses arrive at the same time, they will be processed one by one (sequentially) rather than at the same time. For standard approval workflows, this slight delay is rarely noticeable.

Can I use variables to prevent duplicate approval requests?

While variables can help track status within a single flow run, they cannot share data across concurrent runs. Concurrency Control is the most reliable native method to prevent race conditions across multiple simultaneous flow triggers.

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