Automate the repetitive: Power Automate, Power Apps and Power BI for your business

Many businesses use Microsoft 365 every day: Outlook, Excel, SharePoint, Teams. And yet they keep copying data from one file to another, forwarding emails to ask for an approval and building reports by hand at the end of the month. It is not a lack of effort: nobody showed them that the same tools they already pay for can take care of those tasks.

That set of tools is called Power Platform, and it has three pieces that complement each other.

The three pieces

• Power Automate builds flows: rules of the “when this happens, do that” kind. For example, when a file arrives by email, save it in the client’s folder and notify the person in charge.
• Power Apps lets you build simple apps to enter and look up data from a phone or a computer, instead of loose spreadsheets and chains of messages.
• Power BI turns your data into clear, up-to-date dashboards: what is in progress, what is about to be due and how the workload is spread.

What can be automated

The best candidates are tasks that repeat, follow clear rules and today depend on someone remembering. A few examples:

• Document intake: request what is missing, file each document in its folder and remind whoever has not replied.
• Deadlines and follow-up: every job has an owner, a date and a status, and the system warns you before anything is due.
• Internal approvals: reviews and sign-offs through a defined path, with a record of who approved and when.
• Data entry and reports: data entered once that feeds dashboards without copying and pasting.

This is the kind of work we are developing with an accounting firm in San Juan, Puerto Rico: the Numbers CPA case, which combines its website with process automation.

How to start without losing your mind

1. Pick a single process. One that repeats a lot and really bothers you. Do not try to automate the whole company at once.
2. Draw it on paper. Who does what, in what order and what happens when something goes wrong. If you cannot explain it, you cannot automate it yet.
3. Automate the most tedious part first and leave the important decisions to a person.
4. Test it with the team before calling it done. A flow nobody uses saves nothing.
5. Measure, and only then add the next process.

Things to keep in mind

• Data order comes first. Automating a mess only makes the mess go faster.
• Licenses. Part of these tools is included in certain Microsoft 365 plans, but some connectors and more complex apps require additional licenses. It is worth checking before you start.
• Permissions and security. Define who can see and change each piece of data, especially if you handle client information.
• Maintenance. Flows depend on the accounts and files they connect: someone has to look after them when things change.

A good first step

You do not have to redo everything: it is enough to find the task that takes the most time from your team and start there. If you want help identifying and automating it, write to us. At PuntoArg we connect your tools and your processes so your people can spend their time on what really matters.