How to restrict approver from seeing list items they do not need to approve in SPO

Question

I am creating a SP Online invoice system using MS Flow to send approvals for the invoices. The steps for the flow are as follows.

Account team makes an item in a list for an invoice. Based on the data entered, a manager gets an approval form emailed by the flow. the manager needs to view the item in SP before approving or rejecting it. manager's decision makes the flow move onto the next steps

My issue here is that because the manager needs "Read" permission to view the item in SP, they can see ALL invoices. My initial solution was to create a view for managers, however HR says that's not good enough because they can figure out how to change a view.

I looked into item level permissions and that is where I'm stuck. I can select item level permission to "Read items that were created by the user" however the managers dont create the items, they just approve them. Is there some way I can "Share" the item an approver needs to approve with the flow, using the "read items created by user" option?

Or is there another way I could restrict managers viewing items that they have nothing to do with?

I know that using MS Flow, the approver doesnt need read permission, but as I mentioned the approver needs to view the item in SP before approving so I cannot take that permission away.

Answer 1

I had a similar requirement where a workflow would create some items but I needed to use Item Level Permissions to only show the items to specific users.

There is a way that this can be done in Power Automate and is probably the only way to achieve what you are after, but it depends if you are happy for the Created By to change.

This guide helped me to achieve my solution with the idea being to send an HTTP Request to SharePoint with the correct created by user.

The part of my flow that does this is included below with the items as follows:

• Mail - The mail of the user to update the created by to
• FieldValue - containing the Compose message from the previous step.
• ID - ID of the item to be updated
• Outputs - Output of the second compose step.