Every small business I work with has the same five processes running on someone’s memory. A person remembers to send the follow-up. A person remembers to chase the invoice. That works fine right up until the person is on vacation, or slammed, or just having a bad Tuesday.
Power Automate is included with most Microsoft 365 business plans. Which means a lot of companies are paying for it right now and have never opened it.
These are the five things I’d build first. I’ve put a rough time saving on each one. They’re estimates from my own projects, not a study, so treat them that way. Add them up and you land somewhere north of ten hours a week for a small team, but your numbers will be your own.
What Is Power Automate?
Microsoft’s automation service, formerly called Flow. It sits between your apps (Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Excel, Dynamics 365, plus a few hundred third-party connectors) and runs a chain of steps when something happens.
The mental model is a trigger and then some actions. Form submitted, so send an email and create a task. Date passed, so check a list and tell someone. That’s the whole idea, and most of the difficulty is in the details rather than the concept.
People ask how it stacks up against Zapier. Honestly, Zapier is friendlier for the first hour. Power Automate is better after that, particularly if your business already lives in Microsoft 365, because the connectors are native and you aren’t paying a second vendor for something you already own.
Workflow #1: Automated Lead Follow-Up
Time saved: 2-3 hours per week
A lead fills in your contact form at 9:40 on a Tuesday morning. You see it at two in the afternoon. By then they’ve filled in two other forms, and one of those companies answered in four minutes.
Speed isn’t everything. It’s most of it.
The build is simple. Your form writes to a SharePoint list or fires an email. Power Automate picks it up, sends an acknowledgment from your address inside a minute, creates a task in Planner, and posts the lead into a Teams channel so it exists somewhere other than one person’s inbox. If nobody has touched the task in 24 hours, it nags.
Two things worth knowing before you build it.
The acknowledgment email should read like you typed it in a hurry. “Got it, I’ll come back to you today” beats three paragraphs of branded thank-you copy. People can tell the difference, and the polished version reads as an automation, which defeats the entire purpose of sending it.
Second, if you’re using Microsoft Forms, the trigger only sees forms owned by you or by a group you belong to. A personal form belonging to someone who later leaves the company will quietly take the flow with it. Build it on a group form from day one.
What you need: Microsoft Forms or any form that writes to SharePoint, plus Outlook. Standard license.
Workflow #2: Approval Workflows for Expenses and Purchases
Time saved: 1-2 hours per week
The Approvals connector is the most polished thing in the platform, and it’s on the standard license.
Someone submits a request. Power Automate routes it by amount or category. The approver gets a card in Teams with the numbers on it and approves or rejects without leaving the chat window. The requester hears back immediately, and the decision logs itself to a list.
The same pattern covers purchase orders, time-off requests, proposal sign-offs, and contract review. Build it once, copy it four times.
Plan for one failure mode: approvals assigned to a person rather than a role. When that person is on leave or gone, requests hang there indefinitely and nobody notices because there’s no error, just silence. Assign to a group where you can, and put an escalation after a few days so something eventually moves.
What you need: Forms or a SharePoint list, Teams, Outlook. Standard license.
Workflow #3: Client Onboarding Automation
Time saved: 3-4 hours per client
This is the one I get asked to build most often, and the one where the payoff is obvious the first time it runs.
Onboarding is the same 8 to 12 steps every single time. Welcome email. Shared folder. Kickoff call. Add them to the project tool. Tell the team. None of it takes any thought, all of it takes someone remembering, and the one time it gets missed is the client’s first impression of you.
Pick the trigger that matches how you actually work. A signed contract in DocuSign, a stage change in Dynamics, a row added to a SharePoint list by whoever handles your admin. There’s no correct answer here, only the one that fires reliably in your business.
From there the flow creates the folder structure, sends the welcome email with the documents attached, opens a Teams channel named after the client, generates the task list in Planner, and drops a kickoff invite on the calendar.
One piece of advice that will save you a rebuild later: keep the document templates in SharePoint and have the flow attach them from there. Do not paste the text into the flow itself. The day someone wants to update the welcome packet, you want them editing a Word file, not learning Power Automate.
If you’re on Dynamics 365, log each step back onto the client record as it happens. It costs nothing at build time and it means the account history is complete without anyone typing notes.
What you need: SharePoint, Teams, Planner, Outlook. Standard license, unless you’re triggering from Dynamics, which is premium.
Workflow #4: Overdue Invoice Reminders
Time saved: 1-2 hours per week
Nobody wants to send the invoice email. You did the work, you’re owed the money, and you still sit there for ten minutes rewording the second sentence so it doesn’t come off as rude.
So it goes out Thursday instead of Monday. Then next Thursday.
Have the flow check your invoice list once a day. Seven days past due, first reminder. Fourteen, a second one. At thirty it stops emailing and flags it to you, because the thirty-day conversation is a phone call, and automating that one is how you lose a client who was going to pay you anyway.
Two gotchas here, and I’ve been caught by both.
The recurrence trigger runs on UTC unless you set the time zone in the trigger settings. Leave it alone and your polite morning reminder lands at three in the morning.
And SharePoint’s “Get items” action returns 100 records by default. It does not warn you about this. Turn on pagination in the action settings, or the flow will work perfectly for a year and then quietly stop seeing half your invoices as the list grows.
What you need: a SharePoint list or an Excel file on OneDrive, plus Outlook. QuickBooks Online has a connector if that’s where your invoices live. Standard license.
Workflow #5: Weekly Business Digest
Time saved: 1 hour per week
Short one, and the easiest to justify.
Every Sunday night the flow queries whatever holds your work (pipeline, open tasks, calendar, overdue project items) and puts one email in your inbox. Monday morning you read it instead of opening five tabs to reconstruct where things stand.
It is not a dashboard and shouldn’t try to be. Four or five numbers and a list of what’s due this week. If it takes longer than two minutes to read, nobody is reading it by week three.
Send a trimmed version to each team lead with only their team’s items and it does the same job one level down.
What you need: Outlook, plus SharePoint or Dynamics. The Dynamics version needs the Dataverse connector, which is premium, roughly $15 per user per month. The SharePoint-only version runs on the standard license and covers most of what you’d want.
What Nobody Tells You Before You Start
Three things I’d want to know going in.
Premium licensing sneaks up on you. The standard license covers Outlook, SharePoint, Teams, Forms, Planner and OneDrive, which is enough for four of the five workflows above. The moment you touch Dataverse, SQL, or most third-party business systems, you’re on premium. Check the connector’s license tier before you design around it, not after you’ve built it.
Flows fail quietly. When a flow errors, Power Automate emails the owner and eventually gives up on the flow altogether. If the owner is someone who stopped reading those emails, or has left the company, you find out months later. Put a shared mailbox or a Teams channel on the failure path of anything that matters.
Run history is only kept for 28 days. If you need a record of what was approved, or when a reminder actually went out, write it to a list yourself. The run history is a debugging tool, not an audit trail.
None of this makes the platform a bad choice. It’s the difference between a flow that works the day you build it and one that’s still working in two years.
Where to Start
Build #4 first. Invoice reminders are the smallest build with the most obvious return, and there’s very little to get wrong beyond the two gotchas above. Microsoft’s template library gives you a starting point and you can have something running inside an hour.
Do #1 second, because leads are worth more than the time you save on them.
Leave onboarding until you’ve built two other flows. Not because it’s difficult, but because it touches five systems at once and you’ll design it better once you know how those connectors behave.
If you’d rather have these built properly against your actual setup and your actual process, that’s the work I do.
Marvin Marshall is a Microsoft-certified developer who builds Power Platform and CRM solutions for small and mid-size businesses. ABM takes on a small number of direct client projects. No agency, no hand-offs.