I build a lot of Power Automate flows. Some are complicated, multi-step processes that touch five different systems. Others are embarrassingly simple, like sending a reminder email every Tuesday. The simple ones often save more time.
After a few years of doing this work in Fort McMurray and across the Oil and Gas industry, I've noticed the same five flows coming up over and over. Different companies, different teams, same problems. So here they are, the five Power Automate flows I build most often and why they keep saving people serious time every single week.
1. Invoice processing and routing
Paper invoices are somehow still a thing. Even when they arrive as PDFs, someone usually prints them, walks them to a desk, or forwards them to an inbox where they sit for days. I've seen invoices get lost in email chains for weeks.
The flow I build for this is straightforward. An invoice arrives by email or gets uploaded to a SharePoint library. Power Automate reads the key details (vendor name, amount, PO number) using AI Builder's document processing. It matches the invoice to an existing purchase order, flags anything that doesn't match, and routes the invoice to the right approver based on dollar amount thresholds.
For amounts under $5,000, it goes to a team lead. Over $5,000, it goes to a manager. Over $25,000, it needs two approvals. The approver gets a Teams notification and an email. They can approve right from their phone.
One team I worked with was spending about six hours a week just sorting and routing invoices. After building this flow, that dropped to maybe 45 minutes of handling exceptions and edge cases. The rest happens automatically.
If you're curious about what else can be automated, I wrote about five processes every business should be automating that covers more ground.
2. Safety report compilation
This one is specific to Oil and Gas, but it applies anywhere with regular safety reporting requirements. In the oil patch around Fort McMurray, safety is not optional. There are daily reports, weekly summaries, monthly rollups, and all of them need data from multiple sources.
Before automation, here's what this usually looked like. A safety coordinator opens three or four different SharePoint lists, exports data to Excel, copies numbers into a template, adds some commentary, and emails the report to a distribution list. Every day. Some days it takes 30 minutes. Some days, when the data is messy, it takes two hours.
The Power Automate flow I build for this pulls data from SharePoint lists (or Dataverse, if the company has set that up) on a schedule. It compiles the numbers, populates a Word template or pushes the data into a Power BI dataset, and emails the finished report to the right people. The safety coordinator just reviews it and hits send, or in some cases, the flow sends it automatically.
This isn't about removing the safety coordinator from the process. It's about freeing them up to actually analyze trends and talk to crews instead of copying numbers between spreadsheets. The data still gets reviewed. It just gets compiled by a machine instead of a person spending their morning on it.
If you're still running reports out of Excel, you might want to read why your Excel reports are costing you more than you think. It covers some of the hidden costs that pile up.
3. Purchase order approvals
PO approvals are a bottleneck everywhere I go. Someone needs to buy something. They fill out a form (or worse, send an email). Their manager is in a meeting. Then on a plane. Then it's Friday. Monday rolls around and the vendor is asking where the order is.
The flow works like this. A user fills out a form in Power Apps or a SharePoint list. The flow grabs the details, checks the approval matrix, and sends an approval request to the right person. If that person doesn't respond within a set timeframe (I usually set it to 24 hours for standard requests, 4 hours for urgent ones), it escalates to the next person up.
The approver can approve or reject from a Teams notification, email, or the Power Automate mobile app. Once approved, the flow can update the ERP system, notify the requester, and even trigger the next step in the procurement process.
I built one of these for a mid-size oilfield services company. Before the flow, their average PO approval time was 3.2 days. After, it dropped to about 6 hours. That's not just a time savings for the person doing the approving. That's projects starting sooner, vendors getting paid faster, and fewer angry emails all around.
This is one of those cases where building a custom Power App for the front end makes a lot of sense, because you can design the form to capture exactly what the approver needs to make a decision.
4. Timesheet and hours reminders
Nobody likes filling out timesheets. But everyone likes getting paid accurately, and companies need the data for billing, job costing, and compliance. In Oil and Gas especially, tracking hours against specific projects or cost codes matters for billing clients and managing budgets.
The flow is simple but effective. Every Thursday afternoon (or whatever day works for the team), Power Automate checks who hasn't submitted their timesheet for the week. It sends those people a polite reminder in Teams. If they still haven't submitted by Friday at noon, it sends another one. If they still haven't submitted by end of day Friday, their supervisor gets a notification.
Before building this, the admin person on one team was spending two to three hours every Friday afternoon chasing people down in person or over email. Now the flow handles it. Submission rates went from about 70% on time to over 95%.
It sounds like a small thing. It is a small thing. That's the point. Small automations add up fast. Two hours saved here, three hours saved there, and suddenly your team has a whole extra day each week to do actual work.
5. Equipment maintenance scheduling
This one is big in Oil and Gas. Heavy equipment, trucks, pumps, generators, they all have maintenance schedules. Miss a maintenance window and you're looking at downtime, safety risks, and expensive repairs.
The flow connects to a SharePoint list or Dataverse table that tracks equipment, last service dates, and service intervals. It runs daily, checks what's due for maintenance in the next 7 and 14 days, and sends notifications to the maintenance team. It can also create tasks in Planner or tickets in whatever system the company uses for work orders.
For equipment that's overdue, it sends escalation notices to supervisors. I've also built versions that flag equipment as "out of service" in a Power Apps equipment tracker until the maintenance is completed and logged.
One company I worked with had a spreadsheet taped to the wall in the shop with maintenance dates written in pencil. Stuff got missed constantly. After moving this into Power Automate with a proper data source behind it, missed maintenance events dropped from a few per month to essentially zero. The maintenance team actually trusted the system because it came to them instead of requiring them to go check a spreadsheet on the wall.
The pattern behind all five
If you look at these flows, they all share the same pattern. Information goes from one place to another, a person needs to be notified or take action, and the timing matters. That's it. None of these flows use advanced AI or complex logic. They're just moving data and poking people at the right time.
The reason they save so much time is that humans are bad at remembering to do repetitive tasks on schedule. We get busy. We forget. We get pulled into meetings. A flow doesn't get busy or forget. It just runs.
I should mention that these flows also compound. Once the invoice flow is running, the data it produces can feed into the safety reports. The maintenance scheduling flow can trigger PO approval flows when parts need to be ordered. You don't have to build them all at once, but once a few are running, connecting them becomes obvious.
The other thing I've noticed is that people start seeing automation opportunities everywhere once they have one or two flows in place. Someone on the safety team sees the maintenance reminders working and says "can we do that for our training certifications?" The answer is almost always yes, and it usually takes half a day to set up because the pattern is the same.
What these flows cost to build
People always want to know the cost, so let me be direct. A simple flow like the timesheet reminder can be built and tested in a few hours. The more complex ones like invoice processing with AI Builder take a few days, sometimes a week if the existing process is messy or involves systems that need custom connectors.
The licensing cost for Power Automate depends on what you already have. Most Microsoft 365 Business plans include some Power Automate capability. If you need premium connectors (which you will for things like AI Builder or custom API connections), you'll need a Power Automate Premium license. It's not free, but compare it to hiring someone to manually do the work for 10 hours a week and the math works out quickly.
I'm not going to pretend every automation pays for itself in a month. Some do. The PO approval flow and invoice processing flow tend to show value almost immediately because the time savings are so visible. Others, like equipment maintenance scheduling, pay off more slowly but prevent expensive problems down the line. A missed maintenance event on a piece of heavy equipment in the oil patch can cost tens of thousands of dollars in downtime and repairs. One prevented incident pays for years of licensing.
Getting started
If you're reading this and thinking "we have at least three of these problems," you're not alone. Most companies I talk to in Fort McMurray have all five.
The good news is that these flows don't take months to build. Most can be set up and tested in a few days. Some of the simpler ones take an afternoon. The hard part usually isn't the technology. It's figuring out the current process well enough to automate it properly.
If you want to talk about which of these would make the biggest difference for your team, I'm always happy to chat. You can reach out here and we'll figure out where to start.