Power Automate for Business

Partly. Microsoft states the Business plans include Power Automate for Microsoft 365 with cloud flows only, which covers most of what a small or medium business actually wants — approvals, notifications, filing, scheduled tasks. What is not included is premium connectors for systems outside Microsoft 365, and desktop flows for automating legacy applications. Both are separate licences and both are common surprises. Checked 21 September 2026.

Approvals, almost always. Leave requests, purchase orders and expense claims are frequent, rule-based, currently done by email, and produce a record of who approved what. The value is immediate and everybody in the organisation sees it, which matters more than it sounds for anything that follows.

Anything nobody has written down, anything done twice a month in five minutes, anything about to change, and anything needing real judgement. Automating an undocumented process gives you faster confusion. We turn down automation work on these grounds reasonably often, because a bad automation is worse than none — people route around it and you maintain it forever.

If it was built under their personal account, it stops, usually at the least convenient moment and often without anyone understanding why. We build under service accounts with documented ownership specifically to avoid this. It is also the first thing we check when reviewing automation somebody else built.

Quoted per automation after we have watched the process, because the cost is driven by the exceptions rather than the happy path. An approval flow is typically a small piece of work; something spanning several systems with premium connectors is a project. We will tell you the expected payback period, and where it is measured in years we will say so.

Often yes, and whether it needs a premium connector depends on the system. That is the first thing we establish, because it changes the licensing cost and sometimes the recommendation. Where a premium connector is required for a low-value automation, the honest answer is usually that it is not worth it.

Yes, and it is a common arrangement — Microsoft 365 for email and documents, Zoho for CRM or accounting. We implement both, so we can be realistic about which integrations are straightforward and which are more effort than the problem justifies. Our Zoho integration page covers this specifically.

You can, if it is documented and built under an account that outlives individuals — which is how we build. Where you would rather not, ongoing maintenance sits within an administration arrangement. What matters either way is that the flow is not a black box: you should be able to hand it to any competent provider.