Power Platform for Business Central: extend your ERP without custom development

It's Microsoft's tool for creating automatic workflows between applications, with very little or no code. It's part of Power Platform and integrates natively with Business Central and Microsoft 365. A flow triggers when something happens (an order is created, an email arrives, a document is approved) and automatically runs a series of actions: sending a notification, updating a piece of data in another system, generating a document, or waiting for an approval. The difference from doing it by hand is that the flow never forgets, never gets delayed because someone is busy with something else, and keeps a record of every run, so you can always know what happened and when. It's especially useful for those small, repetitive tasks that, added up over the month, end up consuming a fair number of hours of admin work without adding any value to the business.

No. Flows are designed visually, chaining steps ("when this happens, do this next") instead of writing code, and we build them for you from start to finish. Your team just has to use them in their day to day — receiving the notification, approving the step that's theirs, checking the result; the technical work of designing, testing and maintaining the flow is ours to handle. That doesn't mean you can't learn to make simple tweaks if you're interested: if you like, we also train someone on your team to change small details (the text of a notification, who a notice is sent to) without depending on us for every minor change, though for new or more complex flows we remain the ones designing and testing them.

With Business Central natively, with all of Microsoft 365 (Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Excel) and with hundreds of external services through standard connectors already built by Microsoft: e-signature tools, marketing platforms, social networks, messaging services and many more. If the application you use has an API (a standard way for other programs to communicate with it), it can almost always be integrated even if a ready-made connector doesn't exist: in that case we build the custom connection using that API. This means that even if your company uses several tools from different providers, they can all automatically exchange information with each other through Power Automate, instead of someone having to copy data from one system to another by hand every time it's needed.

Yes. It's one of the most common uses: approval workflows for expenses, purchase orders, holiday requests or special customer discounts, with automatic alerts to each approver the moment it's their turn to act, and a record of who approved it, when, and with what comments. This replaces email-based approval chains, where a message can easily get lost among a hundred others, nobody knows whether it's already been approved or is still pending, and there's no clear history if a decision needs reviewing months later. With an approval flow in Power Automate, the requester can see at any time where their request stands, the approver gets a reminder if they take too long to respond, and a complete, searchable record of the whole process is kept, also useful for internal audits.

Flows are monitored at all times: if a run fails — for example, because a piece of data arrives in an unexpected format or an external application doesn't respond — it's logged with the reason for the failure, and an automatic alert can be set up so someone on your team or our support reviews it and acts immediately, instead of discovering days later that something "didn't happen on its own". We also document every flow, explaining what it does, what triggers it and what steps it follows, so its maintenance doesn't depend on one single person keeping it all in their head. If a flow fails repeatedly for the same reason, we review its design to fix the root cause, not just silence the alert.

Power Apps is for building applications your team interacts with directly: forms to log a work order, screens to check stock from a phone, or an app for a sales rep to register an order while visiting a customer. Power Automate, on the other hand, runs processes in the background without anyone having to open anything: it receives a piece of data, processes it and acts, with no human involvement except when the flow itself asks for an approval. The usual approach is to combine both in the same solution: for example, a sales rep fills in a form in a Power Apps app to request a special discount, and that form triggers a Power Automate flow that sends it for approval and, once approved, automatically updates the order in Business Central. Each tool covers a different part of the same process.