How Power Apps work to increase your productivity

How to use Power Apps to streamline expense claims

We can dive deeper into a specific business scenario to understand the value Power Apps can bring by automating a common business process. Consider the following real-world example of how to use Power Apps to streamline and automate.

Employee expense claims are common in almost any organisation, yet many are still relying on outdated paper-based systems, Excel forms, emails or even third-party solutions. While reliance on dates methods – paper and email – can be time-consuming and inefficient, third-party solutions add in a further, not insignificant, drawback: cost. By switching to a Power Apps solution, not only do business processes improve, but business costs are reduced. It is one of the many examples where PowerApps can help, and if your employees are already Microsoft 365 licensed, you can set it up at no extra cost.

Let’s look at how the nature of the business need resulted in a Power Apps solution.

The challenge for businesses with manual expense claim processes

Imagine a business where expenses are being submitted via an email to the line manager for review. These expense requests are later forwarded to the Payroll team for processing at the end of each month. This scenario presents the possibility for multiple issues to crop up, such as:

• No standard format for submitting the claims
• No certainty for employees as to what information they need to provide and to whom
• Emails and attachments may be lost in the process
• No visibility of the process for managers and Payroll team who need to ‘chase’ the employees
• Claims all processed individually which requires a lot of time and effort
• No clear history of the records

Despite better methods being within reach, many organisations the world over rely on dated and unsustainable methods of internal communication and operation. If any of the above sounds familiar, Power Apps could be the solution to your problem.

How Power Apps can automate business expense claims

The idea is to replace an existing process by building a Power App that will act as a single point of expenses management for each of the personas involved: employee, manager and the Payroll team.

How to build a Power App to automate business expenses: prepare and plan

The first step is to plan where the data will be stored, what information will be captured in each step of the process and how each persona will interact with it. In this case, the company chooses a SharePoint Online List to store their expenses records, as it is one of the data sources they can use with their existing Microsoft 365 licenses at no extra cost.

The company creates a SharePoint List called ‘Expenses Claims’ and adds list columns to store the relevant information:

• Employee
• Date of Expense
• Description
• Expense type
• Total Cost
• VAT Cost
• NET Cost
• Type of Travel (if travel expense)
• Mileage (if car travel)
• Receipt Attachments
• Claim Status

After setting up the data model for the list, we also recommend setting up list permissions for each of the personas, as they require different level of access to the records. For example, employees can only submit the claims and read only their own records, managers can see all their direct reports’ claims and review them, and payroll has access to all the approved records and is able to process them.

How to build a Power App to automate business expenses: Building the app

Once we have our data source built, we start building the Power App. We choose a canvas app We connect the app to the ‘Expenses Claims’ SharePoint List, build multiple app screens and provide controls for employees, managers and payroll to interact with the records.

The screens and levels of control are set as follows:

• ‘Personal’ screen for all employees
  • Users can submit new expense claims by filling in a simple form and attaching the receipts to it. They can even use the device camera to take a picture of the receipt if they’re using the app on a tablet or a mobile device and upload it directly to the system.
  • The form can be dynamic and have various calculations and validations to ensure the required information is captured. For example, ‘Date of Expense’ can have the current date set as default, VAT and NET Costs can be calculated automatically if the VAT code is known, ‘Type of Travel’ dropdown only appears if users select ‘Travel’ as ‘Expense type’, and ‘Mileage’ input only appears if users select ‘Car’ as ‘Type of Travel’.
  • Users can see all their claims and their statuses, filter them by month or year, and see the automatically calculated total costs.
• ‘Manager’ screen for the managers
  • Users can see all the claims submitted by their direct reports, can approve or reject them and leave comments on their decision.
  • Users have options to filter and sort the claims by month or by employee and can select actions to bulk review the claims.
• ‘Payroll’ screen for the payroll team members
  • Users can see all the approved claims together in one place and filter them by month, year and employee.
  • If needed, users can export the summary of all claims in a specific format, convenient for their processing.
  • Users have an option to mark the claims as ‘processed’.

You can also include additional screens such as app support and step-by-step instructions on how to use the app itself.

Once the app is built and tested, users are given access to it by simply sharing the app with them. Each employee will already have the correct level of access to the data, defined by the permissions we have set on the data source.

How Power Apps work to provide real-world benefit

As a result of this app build, all the company’s employees now have access to the ‘Expenses’ Power App, which comes with numerous benefits compared to the old process.

There is now a single point of management for all expenses, located in a responsive app that can be accessed from any place, at any time and from any device. Most importantly, all the data entered into the app is securely stored for company use.

Within the expense process itself, automatic calculations of data and standardised submissions processes provide a far simpler and more pleasing user experience; standardised review processes provide an equally improved experience for managers and payroll.

The app allows each of the personas to track all of their relevant claims, together with a long-term history of previous expenses claims.

This simple yet effective approach to app creation will save huge amounts of time at every stage of the process, from filling out often complicated expense forms, to reviewing the requests and ensuring everything is correct, finally through to signing off on payments and processing the final forms.

This process can be evolved even further by utilising other Power Platform tools. Power Automate workflows can be engaged to send email notifications and reminders throughout each step of the process, and Power BI can generate user-friendly reports on expenses data for organisations to track and analyse.

Although Power Apps is a low-code tool offering simple and quick app-building functionality, other more complex scenarios may require a lot more knowledge and skills. Microsoft offers extensive documentation and support resources, including tutorials and community forums that help users learn how to use Power apps effectively.