I've spent five years watching people do the same thing over and over: copy data from one place to another, chase down approvals, build the same report every Friday. It's painful to watch because the fix is usually straightforward.
The average knowledge worker burns about 4.5 hours a week on stuff that could be automated. Multiply that across a team of 20 and you're looking at 4,680 hours a year. Gone. On work nobody enjoys doing.
Here are the five processes I see wasting the most time.
1. Approval workflows
Someone submits a request. It gets emailed to a manager. The manager has 200 unread emails and doesn't see it. Someone sends a follow-up three days later. Sound familiar?
Power Automate fixes this by routing approvals directly to the right person through Teams, email, or their phone. They tap approve or reject, and the workflow moves on. If they don't respond within a set time, it escalates automatically. No more "I didn't see your email."
Most departments save 2 to 5 hours per week just by automating approvals.
2. Copying data between systems
This one kills me. Information sits in one system but someone needs it in another, so they copy and paste it manually. Every single day. Errors pile up, nobody trusts the numbers, and someone eventually gets blamed for a typo that cascaded through four spreadsheets.
Power Automate connectors link your systems together. When something changes in System A, it updates in System B. No person in the loop means no person making mistakes.
Depending on volume, this saves 3 to 8 hours per week.
3. Report generation
Every Friday afternoon, someone pulls data from three different sources, drops it into Excel, formats it, and emails it to ten people. They've been doing this for two years and they hate it.
Power BI handles the visualization. Power Automate handles the scheduling. The report builds itself and lands in the right inboxes on time. The person who used to build it can now do something that actually requires a brain.
That's 4 to 10 hours per reporting cycle, depending on complexity.
4. Employee onboarding
New hire starts Monday. IT needs to create accounts. HR needs to send documents. The manager needs to schedule training. Somebody forgets to order a laptop and the new person sits at an empty desk for half a day. It's not a great first impression.
One Power Automate flow can trigger the entire chain. New employee record goes in, and everything else fires automatically. Accounts get provisioned, emails go out, tasks land on the right desks. Nothing gets dropped.
This saves 5 to 10 hours per new hire, and it makes your company look like it has its act together.
5. Invoice processing
Invoices arrive by email. Someone downloads the PDF, types the numbers into the accounting system, routes it for approval, and follows up on payment. It's boring, error-prone, and nobody signed up for it.
AI Builder in Power Automate reads the invoice and pulls out the data automatically. It flows into your accounting system, gets routed for approval, and payment schedules update without anyone touching a keyboard.
That's 3 to 6 hours per week back, plus fewer errors that accounting has to chase down later.
Add it up
Even conservative estimates put this at 15 to 35 hours saved per week. Over a year, that's 780 to 1,820 hours. At $50 per hour loaded cost, you're looking at $39,000 to $91,000 in annual savings.
And that's just the time savings. Fewer errors, faster turnaround, and people who get to do work that actually matters? That's harder to put a dollar figure on, but it's real.
Where to start
Don't try to automate everything at once. Pick the process that causes the most pain, build a solution, measure what changes, and go from there.
That's how I work at Northern Analytics. I start with discovery, figure out where the biggest wins are, and ship working solutions in weeks. If you're curious what that looks like for your team, book a free 30-minute call and I'll walk through it with you.