n8nfrom $1,250
Invoice chase and reconciliation
Overdue invoices chase themselves on a schedule that escalates in tone, and stop the moment payment clears.
Power AutomateFinance and admin
Purchase and approval workflow
Approvals route by value and category, chase themselves, and leave a complete audit trail inside the Microsoft stack you already pay for.
Starting price$1,250fixed against a written scope
Build window4 to 7 daysfrom access and answers
Hours returned17 a monthconservative end of the range
Payback2 monthsat $38 an hour loaded
The problem
Why this exists
Approval by email means no audit trail, no escalation when somebody is on leave, and no way to answer how long approvals actually take.
Trigger
Request submitted through a form in Teams or SharePoint.
The build
What it does, in order
- 01
Validate and enrich
Budget code checked against the current budget, remaining spend attached to the request before an approver sees it.
- 02
Route by matrix
Value bands and category determine the approval chain, read from a maintainable table rather than hardcoded in the flow.
- 03
Approve in place
Approvers act inside Teams or Outlook without opening another system, which is the single biggest driver of approval speed.
- 04
Escalate on delay
No response inside the SLA reassigns to the delegate, then to the delegate's manager, with the clock visible throughout.
- 05
Handle absence
Out of office is read from the calendar, and requests route to the delegate automatically rather than waiting a week.
- 06
Write the record
Full trail into SharePoint with the request, the approvals, the timestamps, and the final purchase reference.
The guard rails
What stops it doing damage
This is the part that separates an automation that runs for years from one that quietly corrupts your data for a month.
- Approval matrix is data, not logic, so finance can change thresholds without a developer
- Self approval is blocked structurally, including through delegation chains
- Immutable audit log separate from the working list, satisfying the auditor's actual question
Honest limits
When this is the wrong automation
You are not on Microsoft 365. Power Automate outside the Microsoft stack is a worse version of the alternatives.
Related builds
Others on this platform or solving this problem
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Dynamic pricing and quoting engine
Prices computed from cost, demand, competition, and margin policy, applied consistently, with every change explainable after the fact.
Want this one built?
Send the form and we come back within 24 hours with a fixed price, a scope, and a date.