Typing the same information into two different systems. Sending a follow-up email by hand after every request. Copying data from one Excel file to another. Chasing down approvals that have stalled. If any of this sounds familiar, your team is losing hours every week on tasks technology could handle instead.

Good news: if you’re already using Microsoft 365, you probably have access to automation tools at no extra cost. Here’s how to put them to work.

1. How much time is your team losing on repetitive tasks?

A surprising chunk of the workday at a small business gets eaten up by manual, repetitive tasks: moving information from one tool to another, sending the same reminders week after week, handling simple email approvals, filing documents according to fixed rules.

None of that requires thinking. It just requires time. And that time could go toward work that actually moves your business forward.

• Manually chasing down vacation or expense approvals
• Copying form responses into an Excel spreadsheet
• Sending a confirmation email after every new client request
• Moving files received by email into a SharePoint folder
• Notifying a team every time a task changes status

What automation changes: these tasks handle themselves, in the background, without errors and without delay. Your team gets to focus on what actually creates value.

2. Power Automate: the automation tool already built into Microsoft 365

What this looks like for your team

Microsoft Power Automate is a workflow automation platform built right into Microsoft 365. It lets you create automations between your applications without writing a single line of code.

With a Microsoft 365 Business Standard subscription or higher, your employees already have access to Power Automate’s standard connectors, which according to Microsoft is often enough to get started and see quick wins.

Power Automate runs on a simple principle: if this happens, then do that. For example:

• If a Microsoft Forms survey is submitted, then create a row in Excel and send a confirmation email
• If a file is dropped into a OneDrive folder, then notify the team on Teams
• If an approval request is submitted, then notify the manager and wait for their response before moving forward

It offers more than 1,000 connectors to popular apps: Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Excel, Forms, as well as outside tools like DocuSign, Salesforce, and hundreds more.

3. Five real-world automations for a small business

What this looks like for your team

Here are real examples small businesses set up with Power Automate, based on use cases documented by Microsoft.

• Automated leave approvals: an employee submits a request through a form, the manager gets a Teams or email notification, approves or declines with one click, and the employee is notified automatically. No more email chains
• Collecting and centralizing client requests: every form submission on your website automatically creates an entry in a SharePoint list and sends the client an acknowledgment
• Expense report handling: employees photograph their receipts, Power Automate files them in the right folder and kicks off an approval request to the finance lead
• Automatic follow-up alerts: if a task in Planner or To Do hasn’t been completed after X days, an automatic reminder goes out to the person responsible
• Weekly automatic report: every Monday morning, a summary of the previous week’s activity is compiled from your Microsoft 365 data and sent to managers

What this means in real time: each of these automations can save anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours a week, depending on your business’s volume.

4. AI in Power Automate: taking it further

In 2026, Power Automate builds in AI capabilities that make automation even more powerful for small businesses.

• Document processing with AI Builder: Power Automate can read and automatically extract information from an invoice or purchase order received by email, with no human involvement
• Sentiment detection in customer emails: automatically flag urgent or dissatisfied emails and move them to the front of your queue
• Copilot agents: with Microsoft Copilot Studio, you can build autonomous agents that run entire workflows, from spotting an event to taking action, with no human involvement

These capabilities were reserved for large enterprises just a few years ago. Now they’re within reach for small businesses in Trois-Rivières and across Quebec through Microsoft 365.

5. Where to start without getting overwhelmed

The classic mistake is trying to automate everything at once. The better approach is to identify the three most repetitive tasks in your business and automate the simplest one first.

Useful questions to spot your opportunities:

• What task does your team do exactly the same way every week?
• Which process generates the most human error?
• Which approval takes time simply because everyone’s waiting on an email?
• What information gets entered manually in more than one place?

Once your first automation is up and running, the next ones get easier to spot and implement. The return on investment shows up fast.

At OKTO Solutions, we help small businesses in Trois-Rivières set up their first Power Automate automations. We work with you to identify the quickest wins and configure the flows so everything works from day one.

Discover our Microsoft 365 and automation services or contact us to identify your automation opportunities.