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Automation · person, written procedure, automation
Process automation on Microsoft 365
Onboarding a new starter, approving an invoice, chasing a contract renewal, sending the monthly report: the same hours, every month, by the same people. We sit with the department for half a day, write the process down as it actually runs, and build it on what you already pay for — Power Automate, Forms, SharePoint, Approvals in Teams, an agent in Copilot Studio where questions are the process. Licences are added only where nothing else works, and the hours returned are measured, not promised.
Why
Every automation has three parts: a person who does the work today, a written procedure that says what the work is, and the software that does it instead. Companies buy the third and skip the second. The result is a flow that does what the developer guessed, not what the department does, and it is abandoned within a quarter. We start with the piece of paper. The method, with five department examples →
Half a day with the people who do the work, not their manager. What arrives, what they check, whom they ask, what they send, what counts as done, and what goes wrong once a month. Every exception is written down, because the exceptions are the process.
One page per process: trigger, steps, owner of each step, the decision points, the outputs, the record that proves it happened. You keep this whether or not you automate anything; it is the document a new starter, an auditor and a buyer’s due-diligence team all ask for.
Built on the tenant: a form that captures the trigger, a flow that routes it, an approval in Teams, a record in SharePoint or Dataverse, a message to the person who needs to know. Tested against last month’s real cases before it touches this month’s.
What gets automated
Not the strategy: the Tuesday afternoon. Each of these has been built more than once, and each lands on the licences the company already holds unless stated.
A form from the manager; the account, mailbox, licence and groups created in Entra; the laptop ordered and enrolled in Intune; the welcome pack sent; the checklist for day one in the manager’s Teams. The leaver in reverse, on the day, without the email nobody reads.
The invoice lands in a shared mailbox; the flow files it in SharePoint, extracts the supplier and the amount, routes it to the right approver by amount, records the approval with the name and the time, and tells accounts payable. Two-person approval above a threshold, enforced by the flow rather than by memory.
Every contract in a SharePoint library with an end date; ninety, sixty and thirty days out, the owner is reminded in Teams with the document attached; the renewal decision is recorded; nothing renews by accident and nothing lapses by surprise.
Leave, expenses, purchase requests, access requests: a form, a rule for who approves, an approval card in Teams, a record. The manager approves from a phone in the time it takes to read the card.
The report built once in Power BI, refreshed on a schedule, sent to the distribution list on the first working day with the commentary field filled by the owner. The person who used to spend two days a month assembling it now spends an hour reading it.
“What is the expense limit for a client dinner?”, asked forty times a month. An agent in Copilot Studio that answers from the policy library, in Teams, with the source; and when the policy changes, the answer changes the same day.
A process that changes every week. Automation freezes the procedure; if the department has not agreed what the procedure is, the flow will be wrong by the time it is finished. We say so after the half-day and leave the written procedure behind as the useful result.
A process that exists to give someone judgement. Credit decisions, hiring decisions, anything where the value is a person thinking: the routine around it is automated, the decision stays with the person.
A process nobody owns. Every flow needs a named owner who will change it when the business changes. Without one it becomes the mystery automation that sends an email nobody understands.
Most of the above runs on the Microsoft 365 plan the company already holds: Forms, SharePoint, Teams and the standard connectors of Power Automate are included in Business Standard, Business Premium and Microsoft 365 E3. A process that needs a premium connector — a database, an external system, a signature service — needs Power Automate Premium for the people who run it, €13.00 per user a month on our September list, or a per-flow plan when the flow runs on its own. A form that has grown into an application is Power Apps per app at €4.30 per user a month. The agent that answers questions is Copilot Studio, priced per pack of messages for the whole tenant. We tell you which of these a process needs before it is built, and in your region’s currency.
Next step
One sentence about it and roughly how often it runs. We reply with whether it is a fit, what it would run on, and the price of the half-day and the build — usually within one business day.