An office manager at a Utah construction company spends two hours every Monday compiling project status reports from five different spreadsheets, formatting them, and emailing them to the leadership team. Every single week, same process, same manual effort.

After setting up a single Power Automate flow, the report compiles itself from SharePoint data and lands in leadership inboxes at 7 AM Monday — no human involved. That’s two hours back, every week, forever.

This isn’t futuristic technology. It’s a tool most Utah businesses already pay for and have never opened.

Where Automation Creates the Most Value

The best automations share three traits: the task is repetitive, rule-based, and time-consuming. If someone on your team does the same thing the same way more than twice a week, it’s a candidate for automation.

Approval workflows. Purchase requests, time-off approvals, expense reports, document reviews — anything that follows a “request → review → approve/reject” pattern. Power Automate sends the request to the right approver, tracks the response, and notifies the submitter. No more chasing people down for signatures.

Data collection and entry. When a customer fills out a contact form, the data can automatically create a row in your CRM, send a notification to the sales team, trigger a confirmation email to the customer, and create a follow-up task — all from one form submission.

Notifications and alerts. Get a Teams message when a large invoice is submitted. Get an email when a shared document is modified. Get alerted when a server metric exceeds a threshold. Proactive notifications prevent problems from going unnoticed.

Report generation. Weekly status reports, monthly metrics summaries, daily backup verification reports — if it pulls data from a defined source and formats it the same way every time, automate it.

File management. Automatically move files from email attachments to the right SharePoint folder. Archive documents older than 90 days. Convert file formats. Rename files based on consistent rules.

Power Automate: The Tool You’re Already Paying For

Microsoft Power Automate is included in Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Standard, and Premium plans. If you’re on any of these, you can start building automations today at no additional cost.

The visual flow builder uses a drag-and-drop interface where you connect triggers (what starts the flow) to actions (what the flow does). No coding required. It connects to over 800 services including SharePoint, Outlook, Teams, Excel, Forms, Dynamics, Salesforce, and hundreds of third-party apps.

Example flow — New client intake:

1. Trigger: Customer submits a Microsoft Forms questionnaire
2. Action: Create a new row in the client tracking SharePoint list
3. Action: Send a welcome email to the customer with next steps
4. Action: Post a notification in the Sales team’s Teams channel
5. Action: Create a task in Planner assigned to the account manager

Building this flow takes about 20 minutes. It runs every time a form is submitted, perfectly, without anyone remembering to do it.

Beyond Power Automate: When You Need More

For processes that involve complex logic, large data volumes, or integration with systems that don’t have pre-built connectors, you may need more powerful tools:

Power Automate Desktop (included with Windows 10/11) handles tasks that involve desktop applications — automating data entry into legacy software, scraping data from old systems, or performing actions in applications that don’t have APIs.

Power Apps lets you build simple business applications without code — custom data entry forms, inspection checklists, inventory trackers — that tie into your automated workflows.

Zapier or Make are alternatives for businesses not on Microsoft 365, or for connecting SaaS tools that Power Automate doesn’t support natively.

Getting Started This Week

Identify the one task your team complains about most. The report nobody wants to compile. The approval that always gets stuck. The data that gets typed into three different systems. Build an automation for that one thing, measure the time savings, and use those results to build momentum for the next one.

At Brivy IT, we build custom automations for Utah businesses every week. If you’re not sure where to start or you have a process that seems too complex to automate, reach out for a free consultation. We’ll identify your biggest time-wasters and show you what’s possible.