Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley, CPA, review Microsoft’s Power Automate, one of the robotic process automation tools available from Microsoft 365. Watch the video, listen to the audio, or read the transcript.
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Transcript (Note: There may be typos due to automated transcription errors.)
SPEAKERS: Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA, Randy Johnston.
Randy Johnston 00:11
Welcome to the accounting Technology Lab. I’m Randy Johnston with my co host, Brian Tankersley, today, we want to speak to you about power automate. Many of you have the Microsoft 365 platform, and you already have a robotic process automation tool known as power automate. Now, power automate is just one of five power modules that Microsoft sells. So Brian, do you want to try to explain those five different power platform modules? And the
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 00:39
reason it’s such a big deal here is because a lot of you have spent a lot of time spent a lot of time on Power BI, maybe where you’re putting together metrics and things like that for your clients. And the beautiful part about this is that Power BI, Power Apps, power automate power virtual agents and power pages are all built on a common platform of data connectors and an AI builder, and have a common data service. So the idea here is that once you’ve figured out how to get data in and out of these others, it’s it’s going to be much easier to work with the more complex things. And again, if I’m looking at these in ascending order of complexity, I’d say Power BI is probably the easiest of them, followed pretty shortly thereafter by power automate, and then the last three, you really have to be a little more sophisticated to work with Power Apps, power virtual agents and power pages. So for this session that we’re going to focus primarily on power automate, which is our again, our workflow tool here. The advantage of this, this combined platform, though, is that this micro this these data connectors. You have over 1000 connectors in here that are set up. And the beautiful part about it is, once you’ve figured out how to work with the connector in one of the tools, they’re pretty much the same connectors in the others. And so that’s that’s in here. Also, if we’ve got to ingest data into it for batch processes or other things like that. You’ve got, you’ve got, again, the Power BI data store, and you’ve got the Microsoft data verse, where the data can be stored. And again, you just got a lot of, a lot of great capabilities in here. The reason I want to talk about power automate is that I think that there’s, there are some very interesting things that can be done to automate your processes with power automate that you ought to look at. Yeah,
Randy Johnston 02:25
so Brian is not to distract because I want to go to Power automate next. But the power virtual agents, I’ve been reflecting on how a I agentic AI will work, and I suspect Microsoft’s going to continue to morph power virtual agents further down that way, because originally I pictured them more like chat bots, and you and I have talked about workflow automation and some of the sophisticated things that Microsoft is doing with their workflow as well. So I wouldn’t be surprised to see new power modules for other things like workflow and agentic AI actually surface along the way. But power automate. It’s simple enough to use that most of you can leverage it today and if you are doing repetitive tasks, power automate may be in your future.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 03:17
Yeah, so, so again, we talked a little bit about the power platform here. But again, it’s a low code, no code, tool set, and that’s the important thing here, is that some of the tools, like Power Apps, are pretty hard to use if you’re, you know, if, if you’re not, pretty technologically sophisticated, but, but power automate has enough that you can pick up, that you can do. You know, the you can figure out about 20% of the options in it, and you can do 80% of the work, okay? And that’s kind of the way I look at power automate in here, again, because of those common interfaces, they’re a big deal. And so again, power automate does event trigger data flows between hundreds of applications that used to be called Microsoft Flow. You can put in there business logic and rules that you can connect up to a data flow or a workflow with a no code, low code approach. It also has an integrated robotic process automation tool. Think of this. Think of RPA as basically macros and windows that run across multiple applications. Okay, so where, if you may have used macros in Word or Excel in the past, but you can only use them within that one application. With rpa, you’re really, you really have an action recorder and replay engine that works across most applications in Windows. So you know, again, if you don’t have an interface and don’t have any hope of getting an interface like a legacy on premises, tax, tax application, then the power automates again. Power automates RPA tool. The desktop version of power automate may be in your future. There’s also power apps that lets you build custom applications. I’m not really going to get into that because that’s this doesn’t fit much with our audience. Power virtual. Agents like Randy talked about, is for agentic AI. And again, we expect to see more offerings in this space as we look though, at the UI for power automate. Again, you’ve got a basic it’s a typical Microsoft interface. You’ve got a navigation pane on the left side. You have a search box up at the top. You also have information on the environment. So you can actually have, this is more of an advanced thing, but you can have kind of a production environment and a test environment where you’re trying things out before you start running these flows and they end up creating bogus records in in your CRM system or in your accounting system. There is an AI copilot. You can use learning tools as well as you can ask a chat bot. So again, the beautiful thing about this is that with this co pilot up here, you can ask it questions, and then it can, it can put the modules together that it effectively thinks you’re going to need. Now it will, you know, it’s very much like the tool set that you would use if you were repairing a car or putting in putting in some stuff in it, putting in some electrical wiring with an electrician, or putting in plumbing with a plumber, it’ll tell you the items in there, but it won’t tell you. It won’t tell you exactly what you’re going to have to have down to a fine tooth comb, but it’s going to get you in the in the ballpark of what you need, and then you’ll have to do some work to figure it out. There’s also in here. This is the sidebar menu. You know, nothing super, super exciting here, I would call your attention the templates that are in here, because there are a wide range of templates, if you’re starting with these things, one of my favorite things to do is to start out with a template and then to modify it to meet my needs. So what I try to do is, you know, if I’m trying to do, let’s say I’m trying to send a text message with weather to somebody, then I’ll find something that interacts with weather, or find something that interacts with text messages, I look at the code and the stuff behind that, and I’ll figure out how to take the parts I need out of each one and put them together, almost kind of like a Lego, a Lego Set, where you can’t get exactly what you want, but you have two things that are close enough that you think that you can kind of mash them up and get things going. So
Randy Johnston 07:08
two key things in this menu of power automate is the My flows. If you create a flow, or someone else has created a flow and shared it with you, you can view or edit it, and you can share and edit flows that you’ve created. So this the more friends you have, the more flows you can share and create. But you also have the process mining piece in here, so you can actually see how the workflow works. And my expectation is that Microsoft will leverage that more as time goes on. So I think we’re going to see more workflow automation.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 07:43
Yeah, now the process mining is actually they’ll let you have a trial of it, but then it’s an add on, and I think it’s about $200 a month per user once you add it on. But again, it’s one of those tools that if you need it, you need it, and if you need it, and you’re an organization big enough to have a lot of a lot of transactions where you need to process, mine them. The $200 a month is almost immaterial,
Randy Johnston 08:03
yeah. And you know some of the AI process mining that’s going on, I think we’re going to get more AI inside this as well. But you are correct. It is not part of the base power out of me. Cool.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 08:17
Okay, so in here we also have a number of key terms in here, we’ll talk about triggers, connectors, flows and expressions. Okay, so, so triggers are events that start a workflow automatically. So maybe you added some records, a new record, to a SharePoint list, or an email came in, or somebody filled out a web form, or somebody created an invoice in QuickBooks, or somebody interacted with a post on social media, or, you know, even a specific time, you know, the clock. The clock hits 5:15am, you know, a time is reached every day. So the triggers again, you have to think of this as the lightning or the the thing that that that breaks loose and pushes this toward execution, as opposed to just kind of sitting there doing nothing. Then we have connectors, and these are the automated connectors that can integrate power automate with other apps without having to write code again. You can, you can write API calls and Python scripts and, you know, stuff in just about any language you want, and then feed it in through Visual Studio to work with power automate. But the real action here, for most of us is that I can, I can use the exist, the 1000 existing connectors, to solve a lot of my problems. Now I can’t solve all of them without writing code, but I can solve a lot of them. We also have flows, and these are interconnected steps that automate a business process. And so these, again, can be easy. They can be complex. They can have multiple steps. They can have branching and looping logic. So you can actually let the power you can actually create simple approvals with workflows. You can create more complex workflows and more complex automation tools with Power Apps and then and power automate. Together again within within Power automate. You have three major kinds of flows. There are cloud flows that are triggered based on, again, one of those events, and they trigger, triggered instantly based on a trigger or schedule. So an example of this might be the the trigger that I have that I’m going to use right now. If you’re watching this on video, you can see my lighting is great right now I’m going to now turn my light, my studio lights off by hitting a button, and you can see that I’ve kind of gone a little darker. Maybe you can’t see that, but it but I know it went a little bit darker. And again, you saw the flash when I turned the lights back on just a second ago. But again, like pressing a button, there’s just some action that triggers this thing, you know. So for example, you might have something where somebody applies to be a member of a club, and then it has to be approved by somebody. And so then when they fill out the form to apply, that would trigger one thing that would that would maybe initiate the approval process and then send it out to somebody for approval. Then once it was either approved or denied, that might kick off other workflows that would then move them further through the step of getting them on boarded and set up as members in a club. So these, you know, again, these, these flows that are based on triggers or schedules are in there. You know, it could be, just be that every day, at four o’clock you download the transactions of what’s happened and update your Power BI stuff. We have desktop flows that use RPA to do these repetitive tasks with legacy Windows applications, and of course, the business process flows that will automate and execute the business logic associated with the processes. Okay, there are also templates. And again, there are little hundreds of templates in here to solve different things. You know, this is the real secret sauce for people learning how to do this. You know, there’s obviously training and things like that that you can pick up, but my favorite thing to do, you know, your first your first tip, your first bot that you create probably ought to be something that somebody else already created, and then you just make it work with your stuff, to get used to the environment. And then, you know, after a while, you might go through and modify a template to do something different. But don’t forget that there’s also, besides the templates, there are also tools like the describe it, to design it, tool that’s now, now they’re calling that one co pilot for Microsoft, 365 where, again, the AI will basically put the pieces together that you need, you know, kind of like when you go to the, when you go to the when you go to the auto parts store and you say, Well, I’ve got to do a brake job on a, on a, on, you know, an Oh, eight Honda Civic, you know, they would, they would identify that. They’d ask you a few questions and figure out what engine you had and what kind of breaks you to you had, and whether it was front or rear, and all those things. And then they would give you a list of what most of the things where you need that wouldn’t have everything in it, but it have most of everything. And then you’d have to figure out, you’d have to get directions and figure out how to put this stuff together. Kind of the same thing happens with those templates. They put the parts together, but then you have to, you have to go in and do some customization and some hookup to kind of make those pieces work together the way you want.
Randy Johnston 13:11
So if you think about things that you’re doing repetitively, these templates are frequently going to be able to help you with that. We’ll just pick a simple one, like saving attachments, because I have a work habit that if anybody sends me an email, the first thing I do is save the attachment so I don’t have to come back and find it later. And there’s power automate templates to do those types of things. Yeah,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 13:36
but it could be to post something to a teams channel. It could be to send an email. It could be to forward a something that was sent to a shared mailbox to somebody else, or maybe even forward, like, if you have an AP mail, AP shared, shared box, you might even forward that to bill.com immediately, as soon as it comes in. You know, who knows? So those are all there. We also, you know, again, as we get the results, you can actually visually see how things work out. And again, you can visually, again, you can create a lot of stuff very rapidly with this. And so as we move into this world where we’re using more and more automation, you know, the places where you’re doing lots of repetitive tasks. Now that AI is coming into its own, I wouldn’t you know, I think you need to look at some of these automation tools so that they will they can again, handle a lot of the routine things that you need to do, instead of you having to do it Randy. What? What comments would you have on power automate at this point?
Randy Johnston 14:40
Well, we have asked you to look at robotic process automation with more sophisticated tools over the last seven or eight years, automation anywhere and many, many more, but most of you own power. Automate today. If you’re doing repetitive things, it may be time to spend just a little bit of. Return time around power automate, and the whole power platform for that matter, to see what it can do for you. And I think you might be surprised once you get into it, you will actually, I think, get in the hang pretty quickly and be able to automate many of the things that you’re doing that are mundane day to day. And I’ll just pick on as an example. You want to copy things out of QuickBooks into Excel sheets, or you, you know, things that you do repetitively every day or once a week. You can automate other ideas. Brian,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 15:36
you know, I think it’s a great tool. I think it’s something that you have to learn, but I think you need to throw some time at it. You know, we in in this day of day and age of automation. If we’re going to really have good automation, we have to learn and become more like plumbers and less like people that carry water in buckets. Okay, you know, you and I used to key in our own data, and we’re used to, we’re used to, again, dealing with paper and all those kinds of things like that. Really, we’re trying to get into a world where the technology deals with the data entry and and so forth. And so you have to learn enough about the digital plumbing to be able to be effective with this. And so power automate is a key thing. Here it is, effectively, the plumbing and the valves and the again, the compressors that it takes to the pumps to move this data around to the different places. And so with a little bit of learning, it makes it a lot easier to take this tool and let it handle a lot of your routine, things that that cause you stress and really just lets them get handled automatically. Sounds
Randy Johnston 16:46
super well. We appreciate you listening in today. We’ll talk to you again soon in another accounting Technology Lab. Good day.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 16:54 Thank you for sharing your time with us. We’ll be back next Saturday with a new episode of the technology lab from CPA practice advisor. Have a great week.
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