Automating admin with the Power Platform — where it pays off

The Power Platform — Power Automate especially — is genuinely brilliant, and occasionally a trap. It's so quick to build something that works on Tuesday that it's easy to end up with a fragile web of flows nobody dares touch by Friday. Here's where I reach for it, and where I deliberately don't.

Where it earns its keep

Automation shines as connective tissue — the glue between systems that don't naturally talk to each other. Moving data between an app and SharePoint, routing approvals, sending notifications, and — a favourite of mine — parsing structured emails into usable data. I've turned inbound inspection emails into a live compliance leaderboard on SharePoint this way, replacing a manual copy-and-paste job that ate hours a week. That's the sweet spot: a repetitive, rules-based handoff that no human should be doing.

Where it bites back

Trouble starts when a flow stops being glue and starts being the business logic. Complex branching logic buried in a flow is hard to read, hard to test, painful to version, and prone to failing silently at 2am with no one watching. High-volume or truly transactional work — anything that belongs to the integrity of your ledger — has no business living in a flow; that belongs in Business Central, in AL, where it can be tested and trusted.

A rule of thumb

Automate the glue, not the core. If a process is moving information between systems or chasing someone for a sign-off, Power Automate is very likely the right tool. If it's calculating something the business depends on being correct, or handling serious volume, that logic wants a real home — and a flow calling into it, at most.

Used with that discipline, the Power Platform quietly removes a huge amount of low-value admin. Used without it, it becomes exactly the kind of fragile shadow system it was meant to replace.