Power Automate is Microsoft’s tool for “when this happens, do that” workflows: when a form is submitted, start an approval; when an invoice arrives by email, file it in SharePoint and tell someone in Teams. Most small businesses on Microsoft 365 already have it — business licences include cloud flows built with standard connectors such as SharePoint, Outlook, Teams, Forms and Approvals. You only pay extra for premium connectors, shared desktop automation and AI features, through Power Automate Premium at CAD $20.40 per user per month on a yearly plan.
The best first automations are unglamorous: approvals, intake forms, filing attachments, reminders and the data people retype from one system into another. This guide covers what’s included with Microsoft 365, when you need to pay for more, the workflows worth building first, desktop automation, AI features, and how to keep flows from quietly breaking when someone leaves.
What Power Automate is
A Power Automate cloud flow has a trigger and a series of actions. The trigger is the event — a new email, a form response, a file added to a library, a time of day. The actions are what happens next: create a list item, send an approval, post in Teams, copy a file, update a spreadsheet. Each service the flow touches is reached through a connector, a prebuilt link to SharePoint, Outlook, a CRM or hundreds of other services.
There’s also Power Automate for desktop, which automates Windows applications by mimicking a person’s mouse and keyboard. It’s useful for older software with no connector, and it’s covered separately below.
Flows are built in a browser with a visual designer, and Copilot in Power Automate can draft a flow from a plain-language description. That makes simple flows accessible to a confident office manager — and makes it easy to build things nobody else understands, which is the governance problem covered later.
What your Microsoft 365 licence already includes
Microsoft describes three levels. Every work or school account gets the Power Automate Free licence, which includes creating and running cloud flows (without sharing them) and authoring and running desktop flows locally, with standard connectors only. Microsoft 365 and Office 365 business licences add a limited set of Power Automate capabilities on top, which Microsoft calls seeded licences. And Power Automate Premium is the full product.
| Capability | Included with Microsoft 365 business licences | Power Automate Premium |
|---|---|---|
| Cloud flows with standard connectors | Yes | Yes |
| Premium connectors (SQL Server, Dataverse, HTTP, many third-party systems) | No | Yes |
| Custom connectors | No | Yes |
| Desktop flows | Author and run locally, attended | Register machines, share, trigger from cloud flows — one attended bot included |
| AI Builder credits | No | 5,000 per month |
| Daily action limit | Lower | 40,000 per user |
| Price | Included | CAD $20.40 per user per month, paid yearly |
In practice, most first projects for a small business never leave the standard connectors, because the work they automate lives in Outlook, SharePoint, Teams and Excel.
When you need Premium or Process licences
- The flow touches a premium connector. A SQL database, Dataverse, an HTTP call to another system’s API, or a third-party business system whose connector Microsoft classifies as premium. Licensing follows the people who run the flow, so check who needs it before you build.
- You want to automate an old desktop application on a schedule or from a cloud flow. Triggering attended desktop flows needs Premium; running them unattended — on a machine nobody is sitting at — needs a Process licence, CAD $203.50 per bot per month.
- One flow serves the whole office. A Process licence can be assigned to a cloud flow so it can use premium connectors regardless of who triggers it, with 250,000 actions per day.
- You want document processing. Reading invoices or forms with AI Builder uses credits that come with Premium.
Workflows worth automating first
Good first candidates happen often, follow the same steps every time and currently involve someone copying information from one place to another.
| Workflow | Trigger | What the flow does |
|---|---|---|
| Time-off or expense approval | A Microsoft Forms response | Sends an approval to the manager in Teams or Outlook, records the decision in a SharePoint list, emails the result |
| New client or job intake | A form submission | Creates a list item and a client folder from a template, notifies the team, sends a welcome email |
| Supplier invoice filing | An email with an attachment from a known sender | Saves the attachment to the right SharePoint folder, logs it in a list, tells accounts payable |
| Document sign-off | A file added to a library | Routes it for approval, updates a status column, moves it to a “final” folder when approved |
| Renewal reminders | A daily schedule | Checks a list of contracts, insurance and licences, and emails the owner 30 days before each date |
| New hire setup tasks | A new item in an onboarding list | Creates Planner tasks for IT, the manager and HR with due dates |
| Urgent alerts | An email from a key client or system | Posts it to a Teams channel so it isn’t missed in one person’s inbox |
Our guide to what to automate first with AI covers how to choose candidates and measure whether they paid off. The short version: count how often the task happens and how long it takes, and start with the one that wins on both.
Desktop flows: automating apps with no connector
Some software has no connector and no API — an older accounting package, a supplier portal, a government website. Power Automate for desktop can operate it the way a person would: click, type, copy, save. Microsoft calls this robotic process automation, or RPA.
It works, but treat it as the last resort it is. Desktop flows depend on screens staying exactly as they were, so an application update or a moved button can break them. They also need a machine to run on and, for anything beyond running a flow yourself, Premium or Process licensing. If the same software offers an export, an import or an API, use that first.
AI Builder and Copilot
Two AI features matter for small businesses.
- Copilot in Power Automate drafts a flow from a description — “when a file is added to the Invoices folder, post a message in the Accounts channel” — which you then review and adjust. It speeds up building; it doesn’t replace understanding what the flow does.
- AI Builder reads documents and text: pulling fields from invoices and forms, classifying emails, extracting key details. Power Automate Premium includes 5,000 AI Builder credits per month. Different tasks consume credits at different rates, so test with your real documents before relying on it.
Anything that reads customer or financial documents should have a person checking the results until you’ve seen it run correctly for a while. Our AI consulting guide covers where AI earns its keep and the data questions to ask first.
Keeping flows owned, secure and working
The most common failure isn’t a bug. It’s a flow built by one enthusiastic person that runs under their account, does something important, and stops the week after they leave.
Before any flow goes into daily use
- Add a co-owner, so the flow survives one person being away or leaving.
- Use a dedicated service account for business-critical flows where appropriate, with its own licence and multifactor authentication.
- Write down what the flow does, what triggers it and who to call when it fails — one paragraph is enough.
- Set up a failure notification, so a broken flow is noticed the same day rather than at month end.
- Name flows clearly: ‘AP – file supplier invoices’, not ‘Untitled flow 7’.
- Review flow ownership as part of every staff departure, before the account is disabled.
- Have an administrator set data loss prevention policies in the Power Platform admin centre, so business connectors can't be combined with personal ones.
Flows can only reach what their connections can reach, so the sign-in security covered in our cybersecurity checklist applies here too.
When Power Automate isn’t the right tool
- Your business runs mostly on non-Microsoft cloud apps. Tools such as Zapier or Make often have broader ready-made integrations for that world.
- The software already automates it. Accounting and CRM platforms often have their own rules and workflows. Use those before adding another moving part.
- It’s a heavy, high-volume integration. Syncing thousands of records between core systems every hour is a job for a proper integration, not a flow someone edits in a browser.
- Nobody will own it. An automation without an owner is a future outage.
YVR Technology helps businesses decide what to automate, build it properly and keep it working, as part of our AI consulting and Microsoft 365 services, for businesses across Greater Vancouver, the Fraser Valley and the rest of B.C., including Vancouver, Burnaby and Coquitlam. If you have a process you’d like to stop doing by hand, tell us about it.