Firms are gradually realising that a collection of automation tools in the Microsoft suite could reduce pressure without increasing software costs.

“We found a lot of ways to increase revenue per FTE [full-time equivalent] by creating efficiencies through automation and enabling new services that bring in revenue but don’t depend on people’s time,” says Inbal Rodnay, former head of technology and innovation at BlueRock, a 300-staff Melbourne accounting firm.

A one-player market

Microsoft’s monopoly in the productivity space has become more complete in the past decade.

There was a moment in 2011 when it looked like Google was going to break through with its online productivity suite, Google Apps. However, Google squandered its lead and under chief executive officer Satya Nadella, Microsoft has crushed the competition again. Apart from a few outliers, professional services is a Microsoft world.

The company is going through a purple patch after a rush of innovation under Nadella. A late starter in cloud infrastructure, its Azure service is now a very effective competitor against Amazon Web Services.

Microsoft has also amassed a wealth of technology under the Microsoft 365 banner – the familiar trio of Office apps has ballooned to nearly 40 applications.

Yet accounting firms and corporate finance teams rarely venture beyond Excel, Word and PowerPoint. This is partly the Pareto principle in effect – you will get 80% of the impact from 20% of the product.

There’s something for everyone

But it is also partly due to poor education by Microsoft. Despite owning the professional services market, Microsoft has failed to communicate the potential of its own technology.

Microsoft counts 16 applications as the core of its enterprise licence, four of which are part of the Power Platform. The Power Platform consists of the reporting tool Power BI, a fairly basic chatbot platform called Power Virtual Agents, and two automation tools: Power Apps and Power Automate.

The latter two are powerful tools that can churn out a host of automations to save hours of effort for staff in accounting, advisory and administration. Both tools fall in a category called low code/no code, which is now a movement to liberate app creation from the hoodie-clad developers to the white-collar masses. Low-code/no-code applications give business users the ability to create relatively complex solutions using drag-and-drop interfaces and customisable templates.

The low-code/no-code movement has been slowly building up steam but it is likely to grow quickly with the release of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Microsoft has acquired a major stake in ChatGPT, which can create text-based answers, code or images from text prompts. GPT applications are essentially no-code tools that will dramatically increase the number of non-technical staff creating their applications by themselves.

Microsoft is building GPT (generative pre-trained transformer) technology into its Office applications and has plans to do the same for the Power Platform too.

While Power Automate and Power Apps have taken off in the corporate world, they are rarely seen in accounting firms. But stories of the potential of the Power Platform are starting to surface.

Rodnay used a collection of Microsoft tools including Power Apps, Power Automate, robotic process automation (RPA) and Power Query to develop a crop of automations at BlueRock.

“The first tasks are usually very well defined, they’re relatively easy to automate and they show immediate value. It’s very easy to quantify how much time we saved if there’s something that takes 10 minutes or 20 minutes out of every job. We can multiply by the number of times they do it in a year and we can calculate our savings.”

Automating workflows

Power Automate (formerly known as Microsoft Flow), a platform for building workflow automations, is the simpler of the two tools. It works in a similar way to Zapier, a more well-known automation platform. Power Automate workflows can be triggered by specific events, such as receiving an email or creating a new file.

Paul Culmsee, a strategic consultant at Microsoft consultancy Rapid Circle, often sees finance teams use Power Automate for accounts receivable tasks. Power Automate workflows can detect PDF invoices in an inbox, save the PDF to a SharePoint folder, extract the key information from the PDF and pass it to the accounting or enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, and add the invoice to a checklist as part of an approval process run by the finance team.

“Financial services folks are actually almost genetically predisposed to Power Apps because the underlying language is modelled on Excel.”

Another similar use case is purchase orders that automatically update stock levels and expected arrival times of inventory items.

Power Automate workflows can also help firms with collecting client information. If a firm sends out a templated form for onboarding a client, a workflow can file the form in a SharePoint folder, extract the data from each field and send it to an Excel file, a practice management system, their contacts directory in Outlook and a centralised, firm-wide customer database.

“You can have a workflow listening to an inbox, looking for a particular type of document or attachment, and then picking it up and processing it,” says Greg Brown, practice manager, sales, at Microsoft consultancy Antares Solutions.

Power Automate can also monitor a database or Excel file. If fields change in a database, extract and copy those fields to another application or location.

Building applications

Power Apps is a platform for building custom business applications. These applications can take various forms such as widgets in SharePoint or Teams or as standalone interfaces that run on smartphones, tablets, and desktop computers.

The instructions for creating a Power App will be familiar to many accountants, Culmsee says. “Financial services folks are actually almost genetically predisposed to Power Apps because the underlying language is modelled on Excel,” says Culmsee. “If you have made a complex formula with three or four right brackets on the end you’ve already got 50% of the knowledge needed to use this tool.”

There are an unlimited number of use cases for applications. One common scenario is for procurement. If an employee needs to buy a laptop they need to pick a model from an approved list, then get final budgetary approval to make the purchase. A Power App can display the list of approved laptops and then trigger the workflow approval request.

Another approach to onboarding could involve a Power App showing a form to a new client, saving the completed form in a database or a repository such as SharePoint. Power Automate can then pick up those processed documents and tick compliance boxes or send an email to the client completing the onboarding process.

Brown has set up a similar app for brokers providing advice. The broker checks a form to confirm they have provided the relevant information to the client and reviewed identity documents. The app can check whether a form has been signed and uploaded to the client folder and send an error message if the form is blank.

This automated system proves that the broker has all the documentation on file and creates a detailed audit trail for a regulator such as APRA (Australian Prudential Regulation Authority) to view. “It allows the risk and compliance team to sleep a bit easier at night,” Brown says.

Where to start

Accountants who want to dip their toe into Microsoft’s automation tools should start with a workflow. It might be surprising to know that creating a Power Automate workflow within your existing Microsoft applications is not much more advanced than setting up an email rule in Outlook. You can set up a rule that saves a copy of attachments in emails from your boss to a folder in Microsoft OneDrive, says Culmsee. From there you could add workflows for other senders such as clients and suppliers, and add more complex rules such as extracting information from PDFs.

Once you are ready to start creating applications with Power Apps, try solving a particular problem in your firm. This ‘test’ should help you focus on the process of creating a solution rather than learning a new tool for its own sake, Culmsee says.

“It’s not like Word, where it’s a self-contained tool to produce documents. Power Platform allows you to develop solutions. If you don’t have a pressing use case that drives your focus, you won’t get as much value out of it.”

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Useful apps for firms and finance teams

Microsoft Power Platform uses drag-and-drop workflows and Excel-style formulas to create applications without involving a software developer. For example, a user could create a custom application with Power Apps and then automate specific tasks within that application using Power Automate. Below are some common usages.

Accounts payable: automate the process of managing vendor invoices. The app can capture invoices, route them for approval and generate payments automatically. This can help reduce errors.

Expense management: capture receipts, categorise expenses, and route them for approval. This can help save time and reduce errors from manual data entry.

Time tracking: automate the process of tracking employee time and billing clients for their services. The app can be designed to capture time entries, categorise them by project, and generate invoices automatically.

Inventory management: automate the process of tracking and managing inventory levels. The app can also create purchase orders and generate reports on inventory usage and availability.

Financial analysis: create a custom financial analysis application to analyse data and identify trends and patterns. The app can integrate with financial data sources, such as accounting software, and provide visualisations of financial data to aid in decision-making.

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The full list of Microsoft applications in office 365

Microsoft 365 is much bigger than the Microsoft Office suite. Microsoft has a complex, tiered licensing program that gives access to different combinations or specific tools. The list below includes every single application licence under Microsoft 365, some of which fall under cybersecurity and IT administration, as well as productivity.

Productivity and collaboration:

• Word
• Excel
• PowerPoint
• Outlook
• OneNote
• OneDrive
• SharePoint
• Teams
• Yammer
• Stream
• Exchange.

Planning and organisation:

• Forms
• Planner
• To Do
• StaffHub
• Bookings
• MileIQ.

Information management:

• Delve
• Microsoft Search
• Microsoft Lists.

Document management and presentations:

• Sway
• Office Lens
• Office Remote
• Whiteboard.

Business process automation:

• Power Apps
• Power Automate (formerly Microsoft Flow)
• Power BI
• Power Virtual Agents.

Project management and planning:

Project Planner.

Data management:

Access.

Publishing and design:

• Publisher
• Visio.

Analytics and intelligence:

• MyAnalytics
• Cortana Intelligence Suite.

Device and application management:

• Intune
• Azure Virtual Desktop.

Enterprise resource planning:

Dynamics 365.

Identity and access management:

Azure Active Directory.

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From CA Library