Automation with Power Automate: Less Potential for Error
and more Time for
exciting Tasks

Power Apps and Power Automate - Power Platform Siblings

In our article Power Apps: time-saving application development with Power Apps even for “non-professionals”, you were given an overview of the Power Platform and its products. This was mainly about Power Apps and its possibilities. Today you will get to know another part of this product family - Power Automate. The strengths of Power Apps lie in the area of app creation, i.e. the presentation of different data with a user interface. Power Automate, on the other hand, makes it possible to automate processes without an interface in Business Central as well as in Power Apps. This allows you to see Power Automate as a kind of connecting link, as data from Business Central can also be delivered to a Power Apps app via Power Automate.

The upcoming articles will deal with different aspects of the Power Platform, with a focus on automation around Business Central. We would like to provide you with information sources, handouts and tips that will help you to use the new possibilities for yourself and your company. In addition, we will be happy to assist you if you have a project that may seem too big and you would like to get support.

What is Power Automate capable of?

Automation stands at the core of Power Automate stands - optimizations that make your work more efficient. Most repetitive processes in your organization can most likely be automated. Perhaps it would be nice if your emails could be searched for the term “confirmation” and marked for follow-up? Then please read on, as in this article we will show you how this automation can be implemented in a quick and easy way. Would you like to receive an email notification when an alert is triggered in Power BI? Do you want the purchase invoices to be approved in Business Central from now on? These and similar questions will be addressed in future articles.

Automate Business Central - with your own Flows or with the Help of Templates

You can automate many things with Power Automate - this also applies to Business Central. In addition to flows for approving purchases and sales, a Custom Action can be used in Business Central. This action can start a flow that is equipped with the data record of the page from which it was triggered.

Using Power Automate, you can either build flows for Business Central yourself or use templates for it. For Business Central, there are mainly - but not exclusively - templates for the most important approval scenarios:

How exactly such an approval flow for Business Central looks and how to manage it will be explained in a future article. At the appropriate point, we will also talk about the Custom Action, which you can use to automate your own new scenarios. And you will see what else is possible beyond approvals.

To provide an easy starting point, you will learn from an example what you can use automations with Power Automate for directly.

A Sample Automation

Go to ‘➕ Create’ and scroll down to the ‘Start from a connector’ option. Choose the connector ‘Office 365 Outlook’. Take ‘When a new email arrives’ as the trigger. A new flow is created with only this trigger displayed.

Open the trigger and customize it. In the ‘To’ field, enter the recipient email address that the flow should check. It is also possible to specify several addresses. You can have all emails that land in the corresponding inbox checked. It is also possible to check only the emails from a specific sender, those with high importance or only those with attachments. In the example, assume that you want to search through all emails in your own inbox. The trigger then should look like this:

As the first action after the trigger, set an initial condition and compare whether the email Body contains the keyword you are looking for.

Note: if you want to use a value from a trigger or a previous action, click on the small lightning bolt ⚡ that appears at the end of the field and select the value you need.

Enter the keyword to be searched for in the text of the email, which is case-sensitive. If you want to search for several variants, do not hesitate to add further conditions, e.g. using an OR clause.

Proceed in the same way with the second condition and specify here which keyword should be searched for in the subject. This can be the same expression as in the text search, of course.

In the next step, unfold the first condition and add the ‘Flag email’ action in the TRUE branch. Enter the value ‘Message Id’ from the trigger in the ‘Message Id’ field. Set the ‘Flag Status’ parameter to ‘Flagged’.

Repeat this step for the second condition.

Save the flow. As long as the flow is activated, it will now scan the specified email inbox and flag messages containing a keyword for tracking:

More Resources and Fewer Mistakes - a more Efficient and Relaxed Working Day with Power Automate

What’s in your hands is in your control. With the Power Platform, Microsoft wants to give you options to improve your day-to-day work yourself. For example, with your own app, a chatbot or automated workflows that are tailored to your individual processes. You will gain time that you can use for the really important matters in your company.

At the same time, you free yourself and your employees from the pressure of having to keep an eye on periodically recurring tasks and can concentrate on new projects. In addition, you minimize the potential for mistakes - because in places where repetitive tasks have to be carried out manually, mistakes will happen sooner or later. And problems that you don’t have to fix in the first place don’t tie up resources. This free capacity allows you to tackle the exciting tasks that will really move your company forward!

A useful Tip at the End

If you create a large automated flow, use the shortcut Shift + Scroll. This allows you to scroll to the right and left instead of up and down. This makes it easier to navigate in the Power Automate overview of your flow.