I agree with you that Automation Notifications don't seem to be the solution here unfortunately.

Ah, I see. Automation Notifications then would be my first bet too. Or the new Business Events feature in Acumatica 2018 R1.

Notifications are flawed - they will get triggered multiple times (if no Fields parameters are specified). So for example, if your criteria is "Approved = True", whenever the PO is saved, the Conditions will be evaluated and if still true, the notification will be sent. This has some undesirable results, for example, PO receipts entered against the PO and released, will trigger notifications to be sent.

If you specify Fields on the Fields tab, this will prevent the above scenario but it also means notifications will only ever get sent for the first approval. In other words, if after the first approval, user changes something and gets the PO re-approved, notification will not be sent. The reason is in the help text:

In the case of re-approval, suppose you monitored Approved field (ie add it to the Fields list) - after any approval, Approved field value is True - this means notification will only ever be sent on the first approval (because Approved field value hasn't changed at the time the notification is processed). What the system doesn't detect is that the Approved field did change - ie. to False when the user put the PO back on Hold and then to true again when the PO was re-approved.

Unfortunately we don't yet have Business Events so can't test those to see whether they are any better. 

Try switching to HTML view like this:

Then paste the results here.

I was able to get foreach working in another situation:
https://www.augforums.com/augforums/everything-else/auto-email-received-pos/

One thing I noticed is that you are missing the leading <

The need is now to add the PO transaction lines to the PO Notification.

Acumatica document is only refers to a HTML example using ForEachView

foreach view="Products">
    ((Products.InventoryID)) - ((Products.Quantity)) - ((Products.CuryExtPrice))

but in attempting to adopt for PO Transaction lines, it doesn't work (Im not a HTML programmer).

any assistance would be great.  The first line of the PO comes out as expected.

here is my Notification Text: (attached)

POApproveNotifyText.docx

What I was asking was, how to notify the document owners when their PO was approved or rejected?

Anyway, I had worked this out a while ago using Automation Notifications - I've got it working really well for both Purchases and Sales.

I can't find any configuration for sending notifications to the PO document owner on change of approval status.