Ever since I start using Power Automate in my daily work, it has become a permanent part of my working life. I cannot imagine going back to the days where I need to manually perform certain repeating tasks daily when it can be easily automated with Power Automate.
With Power Automate, I just basically set the flow once, test it a few times (maybe a bit more than a few times if I am feeling adventurous and want to create a more complicated flow), and once the flow is set, I can just forget all about it. That is, until there are issues with the flow (not a usual occurrence), which conveniently, Power Automate will notify me via automated email to my mailbox.
I am currently working in a commercial finance department, and the following are the top 3 uses that I use Power Automate for my working life:-
Automate the saving of email/ email attachment to a SharePoint folder
We can use Power Automate to extract attachments from email received and save them to SharePoint automatically. Some examples of documents I will save :-
Regular reports — If there are any reports that I would need to download and save regularly, I prefer to use the scheduler function that is usually available at the sites and to set it to email to my mailbox. Then I would set Outlook rule to send to a separate folder so I will never need to manage my inbox for this email. Then comes Power Automate to save the attached reports in the emails into a SharePoint folder for me to refer to at a later time.
PDF copies — When vendors send emails with invoice/ receipt attachments, Power Automate sends all the invoice/ receipt attachments into a folder in SharePoint for me automatically. I don’t need to open every email and download the attachment one by one. I just only need to go look for the invoice in the SharePoint folder when I need them.
Email trail — When there are certain issues that the team needs to keep a central email record for, the team just needs to reply or send email with certain keywords in their email title(e.g. need to contain the word “Dispute Case”), and cc a common mailbox. Power Automate sends all the relevant emails that the common mailbox receive that contains the set keyword to a folder in SharePoint.
To do this, we can start with this template :
Save my email attachments to a SharePoint document library
Automate approval flow
There could be some internal approvals needed from me, and normally internal approval is via email requests. But this process is too much work because :-
- I have to keep track of which email I have approved, not yet approved or have declined
- If there are claims, I have to ensure I do not approve duplicate claims — either I need to keep track on my own or rely on my memory
- Since requests are via email, there would be many patterns and style of submission. Some even have incomplete information which I need to send back, and then look again when I receive a reply
My solution : Create Microsoft Form with all the information I need. Then I use Power Automate to create Approval Flow, which sends results back to form submitter to update them and also updates a Microsoft List I setup for me to store the information for all the applications I receive.
To do this, we can start with these template :
Start an approval process and send an email on Microsoft Form submission
Send form responses for approval
Automate routine reports from List
As seen from the above item, I regularly use List to coordinate issue status or approval status. Sometimes I need to save the report to SharePoint for certain parties or send the reports out, and I only want them to see only certain category of items from the list.
For that, I use Power Automate to download the list into Excel format on intervals (for example hourly or daily). I set the filter in the flow so that I can filter off categories of items for the reports to make reports more relevant to its viewer target.
To do this, we can start with this template :
Copy SharePoint list items to Excel Online Business
Conclusion
I personally believe that everyone should try using Power Automate to make their routine & boring tasks to be done by the system, and spend more time on more value added tasks. With their ever expanding number of templates that is ready to use, we do not need to be technical experts to start trying them out.
