C03 · 2025
Process Flow Automation
- Client
- Regional professional services firm
- Sector
- SME / Professional Services
- Duration
- 8 weeks
- Outcome
- –60% manual admin hours
- Tech Stack
- N8N · Microsoft 365 · Power Automate
The brief.
The problem
Repetitive document handling, invoicing, and client onboarding were consuming a full day per person per week across a ten-person professional services firm on the Gold Coast. New client set-up alone involved manual data entry into four separate systems, drafting welcome documents from scratch, and chasing document returns by email — a process that routinely stretched across six working days. Invoice processing required an administrator to manually pull time records, transpose them into the billing system, and send individual emails. Each error in that chain cost another hour of remediation work.
The constraint
The firm had no in-house IT function. There was no developer on staff, no budget for new SaaS subscriptions, and no appetite for a solution that would require ongoing vendor support to keep running. Everything had to be built and maintained inside the tools the team already paid for: Microsoft 365 and the Power Platform. Any automation that required external servers, custom code deployments, or a dedicated administrator to maintain was out of scope from day one.
How we built it.
The engagement opened with a half-day process mapping workshop. We walked every member of the administrative team through a typical week, capturing each task at the step level: what triggered it, what inputs it needed, what the output looked like, and where it touched another system. By the end of the session we had a whiteboard covered in swimlane diagrams and a ranked list of twelve automation candidates ordered by time saved versus implementation complexity.
Invoicing went first. A Power Automate flow monitored the team's shared project tracking list in SharePoint, triggered at the end of each billing period, pulled confirmed time entries via the Microsoft Graph API, and generated a pre-populated invoice document from a Word template. A second step sent the draft invoice to the responsible consultant for a one-click approval before the final copy was emailed to the client and archived. The whole cycle — from time-entry lock to invoice-sent — ran in under ten minutes without any manual intervention.
Client onboarding followed a similar pattern. A Microsoft Form collected the new client's details; a Power Automate flow consumed the submission, created a SharePoint folder structure, generated the engagement letter and welcome pack from templates, sent the documents via Outlook for e-signature, created a Teams channel, and added the client to the firm's contact list — all without a human touching a keyboard. What previously required a consultant to spend parts of six days chasing and filing now completed in under two hours.
“We kept waiting for it to break. It never did. Six months in, those workflows just run. The team doesn't even think about invoicing any more — it's done before they remember it's due.”
The final four weeks covered the remaining ten workflows: project status reporting, document version control notifications, staff timesheet reminders, and supplier purchase order tracking. Each was documented in a one-page runbook stored in SharePoint so a non-technical team member could understand, edit, or troubleshoot any flow without external help. The handover included a two-hour training session for the managing director and the office manager, covering how to modify an existing flow and how to build a simple new one from a template.
What moved.
What we shipped.
