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Automation · 25 September 2026 · 10 min read
Every department has a routine it does by hand: the new starter, the invoice, the renewal, the monthly report, the forty questions a month about the expense policy. Automating it on Microsoft 365 is not hard. Automating it so that it still runs in a year is a method, and the method has a step almost everyone skips.
The method, in one table
| Step | What it produces |
|---|---|
| 1. The person | Half a day with the people who do the work: what arrives, what they check, whom they ask, what they send, what counts as done, what goes wrong once a month |
| 2. The written procedure | One page per process — trigger, steps, owner of each step, decision points, outputs, the record that proves it ran. Kept whether or not anything is automated |
| 3. The automation | Built on the tenant from the page: a form, a flow, an approval in Teams, a record, a message. Tested against last month’s real cases |
| 4. The measurement | Hours per month before and after, from the people, not from a slide; errors that stopped happening; the audit trail that now exists |
Companies buy step three and skip step two. A developer is asked to “automate onboarding”, builds what onboarding looks like from the outside, and the department quietly goes back to email within a quarter because the flow does not handle the case that happens every second Tuesday. The failure is not technical. It is that nobody wrote down what onboarding is, so there was nothing to automate — only a guess.
The written procedure is the whole method. It is one page: what triggers the process, the steps in order, who owns each step, where the decisions are and who makes them, what comes out, and what record proves it happened. Writing it takes half a day with the people who actually do the work, not with their manager, because the manager knows the process as it was designed and the people know it as it runs, including the exceptions — and the exceptions are the process. Once the page exists, the automation is a translation, and the page stays useful even if nothing is ever built: it is the document a new starter reads on day one, the document an auditor asks for, and the document a buyer’s due-diligence team wants to see when they ask how the company actually runs.
The pitch for automation is usually “people can focus on higher-value work”, which is true and which nobody believes because it is never measured. Measure it: the accounts-payable clerk who spent twelve hours a month forwarding invoices for approval spends one, and the eleven go to closing the month two days earlier. The office manager who assembled the monthly report over two days reads it in an hour and spends the rest on the supplier renegotiation that has been on the list since spring. The point is not that people become creative because a flow exists; it is that the hours become visible, and visible hours get spent on something that was not being done. That number — hours returned per month, per person, from the people themselves — is the only honest measure of an automation, and it is the one the board will ask for.
Each of these lands on licences most companies already hold; where a process needs more, the line says so, at Microsoft’s September list price for Europe.
The routines, what they run on, what they cost to license
| Routine | Before | After | Runs on |
|---|---|---|---|
| HR: the new starterand the leaver, in reverse | An email chain between HR, IT and the manager; the laptop arrives after the person; the licence is assigned on day three | The manager fills a form; the account, licence, groups and mailbox are created in Entra; the laptop is ordered and enrolled in Intune; the day-one checklist lands in the manager’s Teams | Forms, Power Automate, Entra, Intune — all in Business Premium and E3 |
| Finance: invoice approvalwith two-person approval above a threshold | Invoices forwarded by email to whoever seems right; approvals in replies; the audit trail is a search of Sent Items | The invoice lands in a shared mailbox, is filed in SharePoint, routed to the approver by amount, approved in Teams with name and time recorded, and accounts payable is told | Power Automate with the standard connectors; the AI extraction of supplier and amount needs Power Automate Premium at €13.00 per user a month |
| Legal and sales: contract renewals | End dates in people’s heads; renewals by accident, lapses by surprise | A contract library with end dates; reminders at ninety, sixty and thirty days with the document attached; the decision recorded | SharePoint and Power Automate, included in every business plan |
| Management: the monthly report | Two days a month assembling numbers from five sources into a deck | The report built once in Power BI, refreshed on schedule, sent on the first working day with the owner’s commentary | Power BI Pro for the people who publish and read it, in E5 or €10.40 per user a month |
| Everyone: the questionsthe expense limit, the leave policy, the VPN | Forty questions a month to HR and IT, answered forty times | An agent in Teams that answers from the policy library with the source, and changes its answer the day the policy changes | Copilot Studio, priced per pack of messages for the whole tenant |
A sixth that comes up in every company: the requests. Leave, expenses, purchases, access — a form, a rule for who approves, an approval card in Teams, a record in a list. It is the same pattern five times, which is why the second one costs half of the first.
One sentence about it and how often it runs. Half a day with the department to write it down, a quote for the build, and the licences it needs in your currency — before anything is built.
A process the department has not agreed on. If two people describe it differently in the half-day, the deliverable is the argument, settled, on paper; the automation waits until the paper stops changing. Automating a moving process produces a flow that is wrong by the time it ships.
The decision inside the process. Whether to extend credit, whom to hire, whether the contract is worth renewing: automate everything around the decision — the gathering, the routing, the record — and leave the decision with the person whose judgement the company pays for.
Anything with no owner. A flow without a named owner becomes, within a year, the mystery automation that sends an email nobody can explain. The owner is written on the page before the flow is built.
What the automations are built with
| Tool | What it does in a process | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Forms | The trigger: the request, the new starter, the expense | Every Microsoft 365 plan |
| Power Automate | The routing, the record, the message; the standard connectors cover Microsoft 365 end to end | Every business plan; premium connectors and AI extraction need Power Automate Premium, €13.00 per user a month, or a per-flow plan at €86.60 a month when the flow runs on its own |
| Approvals in Teams | The decision, from a phone, with the name and the time recorded | Every plan with Teams |
| SharePoint lists and libraries | The record: the contract, the invoice, the request and its status | Every business plan |
| Power Apps | When a form has grown into an application: the field form, the intake screen, the dashboard | Power Apps per app, €4.30 per user a month; Power Apps Premium, €17.30, for people who use several |
| Copilot Studio | The agent that answers questions from documents, in Teams, with the source | Per pack of messages for the tenant; a free per-user licence for the people who use it |
| Power BI | The report that builds and sends itself | Pro, €10.40 per user a month; included in E5 |
Three things an owner can put a number on. Hours: a written procedure and a flow typically return a working day a month per routine per person involved, and the number is measured, not assumed. Errors: the invoice paid twice, the renewal missed, the leaver whose account stayed open for a month — the flow does not forget. Evidence: every approval with a name and a time, every request with a record, which is what an auditor, an insurer and a buyer ask to see. And the page itself, the written procedure, is the asset that outlives the software: the next tool can be built from it in a week.
The half-day with the department produces the written procedure whether or not you automate; the quote for the automation follows it. Priced per process, on request.
For most of the routines above, no: they are built with Power Automate, Forms, SharePoint and Approvals by someone who knows the tenant. A form that has grown into an application, or an integration with a system outside Microsoft 365, is where development starts.
Half a day to write it down; one to three weeks to build and test, depending on how many decisions and systems it touches. The second process of the same shape takes half as long.
It is quoted per process after the half-day, because a leave request and an invoice approval with three systems are not the same size. The written procedure is delivered either way.
Usually the one you have: the standard connectors, Forms, SharePoint and Approvals are inside every business plan. Premium connectors, AI extraction, an application or an agent need Power Automate Premium, Power Apps or Copilot Studio, and we say which before the build.