Manual Processes, Slow Approvals: Power Platform Automation

A $500 expense claim is sitting in someone's inbox. The manager who needs to approve it is out of office, and nobody is quite sure who's covering for him. Finance sent a reminder two days ago; there's been no reply. Meanwhile, someone on the finance team is opening five different spreadsheets just to find out how many expense claims got approved last month.

This operational bottleneck isn't confined to a single department. Whether it's procurement, HR onboarding, contract approvals, or quality assurance, the core friction remains identical: A request comes in, it needs to reach the right person, and the moment that person is busy or unavailable, the whole process stalls.

This is exactly the operational challenge we addressed in our July 1 webinar: how to transform this recurring manual approval cycle, present in dozens of processes across an organization, into something digital, traceable, and fast. Metin Demirel, who has led Pargesoft's Power Apps team for four years, built an approval flow from scratch live on screen, using real project scenarios. This article walks through the session, with the same examples shown on screen.

The same bottleneck shows up in every department

Manual process usually brings accounting to mind first, but the scope is much wider. Operations, finance, HR, sales, and support teams all suffer from a similar cycle daily: a request is created, it needs to reach the right approver, that person approves or rejects it, and the result gets recorded somewhere. Whenever a step in that chain relies on ad-hoc emails, Teams messages, or paper trails, the speed of the entire operation depends entirely on whether that one individual happens to be at their desk that day.

Based on Pargesoft's field analysis, Metin Demirel highlights that the actual roadblock isn't the "approval" step itself—it's the communication void surrounding it. An email goes out and gets ignored; a reminder follows and gets lost. When someone finally calls the approver, they find out they're looking at an entirely different list, resetting the whole cycle. Depending on the corporate hierarchy, these delayed approvals can stretch from a week to several months, and in some cases, turn into a hidden cost where the request is never finalized.

A sluggish approval process rarely stems from one major systemic failure. It accumulates from small, easy-to-miss frictions: an unanswered email, a request trapped behind a manager on leave, or an outdated approval list.

Industry research backs up the scale of the loss. According to Ardent Partners' State of ePayables research, the average cost of processing a single invoice manually runs above $13, and that figure doesn't even include the time spent fixing errors. Furthermore, the McKinsey Global Institute has found that knowledge workers spend roughly a fifth of their working week just tracking down internal information and the right colleague to talk to, adding up to nearly a full workday lost every week.

Power Platform's architecture: approvals and automation on one ecosystem

The architectural framework Demirel laid out shifts the perspective: speeding up approvals isn't about automating a single email notification; it's about digitizing the workflow end-to-end. It's about giving users the ability to search "expenses I logged last month" or "approvals waiting on me" inside a unified dashboard, rather than digging through complex email threads.

Four core components form the backbone of this framework. Power Apps builds the interactive front end, the interface where a user submits a form or reviews a request. Power Automate runs the intelligent logic behind it; triggering when a record is created, routing it based on predefined rules, and securely writing the result back to the core system. Power Automate itself functions in two ways: Cloud Flows handle data exchange through APIs and process orchestration between systems, while Desktop Flows handle Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for legacy, repetitive manual clicks. When a process requires external input, such as an approval from an outside legal counsel or vendor, Power Pages steps in, enabling secure external approvals through a portal. Underpinning all of this is Dataverse: a highly scalable data layer that enforces relationships, business rules, security roles, and maintains a full audit trail for every transaction.

Connectivity is broad. Beyond Microsoft's own products, Power Platform connects to different ERP systems like SAP and Oracle, and different mail infrastructures like Gmail, through more than 1,000 built-in connectors. Where a ready-made connector doesn't exist, you can build a custom one, or reach on-premises systems through a data gateway.

This flexible integration architecture is not solely shaped by Pargesoft's field expertise; it directly aligns with the global digital transformation strategies projected by Gartner. According to Gartner's forecast, by 2026, 75% of new enterprise applications will be developed using low-code technologies, a substantial leap from the 40% level in 2021. We leverage the Power Platform ecosystem to bring this exact vision to life within your organization: empowering your business units, such as Finance, HR, and Manufacturing, with the agility to digitize their own workflows, while never compromising on the centralized visibility, security, and IT oversight your technology leadership demands.

The anatomy of an approval flow

Before showing how flows actually get built, the webinar walked through the four building blocks every flow shares:

• Trigger: the event that starts the flow. A record being created, an email arriving, or a field's status changing.
• Condition: the rule that determines which path the flow takes. For example, expenses over $500 go to the finance manager, anything under goes to the direct manager.
• Approval: where the approval itself is captured, whether by email, form, or Teams.
• Action: what happens once approval is complete, whether that's posting the record to the relevant system or sending out notification emails.

A critical operational safeguard discussed during the session is error handling. Designing a robust workflow isn't just about mapping the "happy path" when everything works. It requires establishing exact protocols for when a data sync fails or an integration drops—ensuring that the system automatically alerts the IT admin or process owner before a bottleneck forms. Skip that step, and automation turns into an invisible risk.

Automation examples from real projects

Most of the session was dedicated to exploring use cases from projects Pargesoft has already successfully deployed.

Invoice and expense automation is often the most immediate need. Invoices may originate directly within the ERP, get pulled periodically from an e-invoicing integrator, or arrive via email from overseas vendors. The moment a record is created, conditional routing activates: standard invoices land with accounting, while specific vendor invoices bypass the queue to reach the assigned approver instantly. Once approved, the system posts the record directly to the appropriate ledger. This centralization makes financial reporting effortless—viewing monthly team spend or invoice volume no longer requires compiling separate reports; the data is live on a single dashboard.

The same logic applies to hiring and onboarding. A position request opens through Power Apps, candidate pool evaluation moves faster with Copilot support, and once an offer is approved, onboarding steps such as account setup, equipment, and training assignments trigger automatically. That gives HR a single end-to-end flow from the first day of the hiring process through an employee's first day on the job.

On the procurement side, a flow can start with something as small as a broken keyboard and extend all the way to a purchase order. The request routes to the relevant manager or directly to procurement, quotes get compared, and an approved request converts into an order.

In manufacturing shop floor operations, these two platforms deploy in flawless integration. Power Apps and Power Automate operate in perfect synchronization to execute complex scenarios, such as automatically initiating quality assurance protocols and transmitting work order reports directly to the Quality Dashboard.

What we demonstrated in the live demo

The demo section showed a single approval management panel, accessible equally from phone, tablet, or browser. The panel lists pending approvals, the status of requests you've submitted, incoming invoice processes, expense entries, and purchase requests, all on one screen.

Smart delegation is natively integrated into this executive dashboard. When an approver is out of office, the system automatically detects their absence and reroutes the request to a designated delegate, ensuring uninterrupted workflow continuity. An intelligent suggestion feature also eliminates manual guesswork in invoice approvals by displaying historical ledger entries for specific vendors, enabling finance teams to route even unprecedented documents instantly. Furthermore, the architecture effortlessly manages complex allocations. A single invoice can be divided across multiple accounting entries, navigating a hierarchical approval matrix from accounting to IT and back for the final ledger post. To prevent downstream errors, the workflow proactively halts if a mandatory field, such as a tax rate, is left blank. Accounting teams can either return the request with an automated explanation or utilize their permissions to correct the field directly, closing the operational loop in a single step.

The most striking part of the session was watching an approval flow get built entirely from scratch, live. A flow that emails an external approver, say a lawyer, when a record is created, and updates the record based on their reply, was built step by step on screen. Building a flow like that from zero, including the interface, takes about 35 minutes on average.

Source: Forrester Consulting, "The Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Power Platform," commissioned by Microsoft, 2024.

Keeping speed and control together

When transitioning to low-code platforms, the most valid concern for IT leaders is the loss of centralized control. Microsoft data shows that organizations lacking a corporate oversight standard create three to five times more unmonitored environments without IT's knowledge. Gartner clearly validates this 'uncontrolled digitalization' crisis, reporting that nearly 40% of enterprise technology spending now occurs entirely outside the IT department.

The webinar struck the same balance. At Pargesoft, we don't just build a process and hand it over; we define who can see which table and who can build what through Dataverse's security roles, and we train internal teams to extend these processes on their own. The goal isn't to stop business units from building things, it's to make the right path easier than the workaround.

Adding an AI layer to automation

The ultimate transformative layer of the Power Platform ecosystem is Artificial Intelligence. Photographing a physical receipt now instantly extracts and populates the necessary expense data. Intelligent virtual agents developed via Copilot Studio can analyze document contents and autonomously classify incoming files as invoices or standard receipts. This autonomous classification eliminates the manual sorting bottleneck often caused by international documents. Furthermore, workflow creation is now entirely conversational. Administrators simply describe their required approval hierarchy in natural language. Copilot instantly drafts the underlying routing logic, allowing the IT department to review and securely deploy the architecture to production.

The answer to where to start was clear. On the product side, start with Power Apps; on the process side, start with whatever process is most common and relatively simple in your organization, expense and advance approvals are a typical starting point, since that accelerates the learning curve. And Dataverse isn't a requirement to get going: an existing SharePoint list can serve as the data layer just as well.

Pargesoft has been one of Microsoft's leading solution partners for its business applications portfolio since our founding. We've been in this space for close to 25 years, with operations in Türkiye, the UK, and Belgium. We hold Solutions Partner designations from Microsoft across Business Applications, Data & AI (Azure), and Digital & App Innovation (Azure). On the Power Platform side, we deliver both the application development itself and the governance and training internal teams need to run the platform confidently on their own.