M365 Show Podcast

Automations That Fix D365’s Biggest Headaches


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What if you could hand off invoice approvals in Dynamics 365 without lifting a finger—and know your leads and cases are always routed to the right team? This isn’t wishful thinking—it’s what you’ll learn to automate today, using Power Automate and Copilot. Let’s break down the system holding your business back, and see how a few smart triggers can connect your D365 modules, save hours, and finally let your team focus on the work that matters. Ready to rethink the way your workflows actually work?Why D365 Automation Still Feels DisconnectedIf you’ve ever built a workflow in D365 and wondered why things still slip through the cracks, you’re not alone. Most organizations use Power Automate to handle one process at a time—move a lead, assign a case, send out an approval—but those quick fixes start to pile up. You end up with a patchwork of rules, each living in its own silo. The result? Processes that technically “work,” but add friction of their own. The reality is, these isolated automations are like putting band-aids on plumbing leaks—you’re not solving the deeper issue, just shuffling work around and hoping it holds.Let’s talk about where these silos show up. You automate the lead assignment. The lead goes to the right rep, but now the sales ops team has to manually update the case status, since no trigger covers that handoff. Meanwhile, your finance team approves an invoice and assumes the system will handle the rest. In practice, payment reminders and updated payment statuses often lag behind—because the automation ends as soon as one step is complete. That’s time lost and opportunities missed, buried under all those “just one more” manual steps that keep people from focusing on their real jobs. If you picture your D365 environment as a set of islands, each automation lives on its own, with very few bridges between them.Now here’s the strange part—D365 was designed to connect your business, not keep it split apart. But most automations treat each module as a separate world. Why? Some of it is technical, but more often it’s about how teams set up their flows. Instead of seeing the system as a whole, they carve out workflows for just one business group or department. For example, cases get routed in Customer Service, but there’s no automatic sync with Sales if that customer suddenly changes status. Or a Payment Approved trigger in Finance doesn’t speak to the project ops team, leaving them guessing if they can start work. It’s like running a relay race where each runner hands off the baton—except here, nobody actually runs to meet you, so you have to walk the baton over yourself every time.If this sounds familiar, you’re in good company. According to recent user research, more than 60 percent of D365 users say their workflow automations don’t really help cut down manual tracking between business roles. It’s a bit like ordering same-day delivery, only to find out every item in your order is shipped separately, days apart—it was all supposed to arrive together, but instead, it makes more work for everyone. These gaps may not sound dramatic, but they stack up. Reminders to the finance team get lost. A customer case sits idle because sales never sees that the deal was approved. Maybe an invoice sits in limbo, waiting for a team that never even knew it was ready.The friction becomes even clearer when you look at the transfer points. Take lead assignment again. Sure, you’ve got a trigger that routes leads from Marketing to Sales, based on region or product interest. But what about the next step? Does that same flow update account managers? Does it ping the support team if there’s an open case? Often, the answer is no—so someone, somewhere, has a notepad or an Excel file just to keep track of what’s still outstanding. The promise of automation was to end this, but most setups stop right before the finish line.And here’s the result: teams end up with workarounds. Maybe you use Power Automate to shoot off an email when an invoice is paid, but you still need a manager to check a dashboard once a week “just in case.” Or you have a case closure notification, but it relies on a user remembering to press a button that was buried in training three years ago. This is about as efficient as a warehouse where every pallet requires five separate calls to move from loading dock to storage. You’re automating, but the system still leans on human intervention at each step.If you ask admins why they don’t connect more steps—linking Case, Sales, and Finance—they’ll point to complexity. System-wide automations, the kind that touch multiple modules and impact more than one team, start to look risky. One missed trigger and you could double-send an invoice, or update the wrong customer record. Even seasoned admins will tell you that sprawling flows feel fragile, and if they fail, the fix might take days. It’s much “safer” to automate in one place and hope for the best—even if it leaves gaps everywhere else.But there’s a real cost to playing it safe. Instead of freeing people up, disconnected automations just hide the manual work behind more emails, more spreadsheets, and more status meetings. The promise of a connected D365 environment is lost in translation. Ironically, it’s not the technology holding us back—it’s how we map out the workflow. Most teams don’t step back to consider the full process flow across every department or module. That’s where the biggest wins are hiding: in connecting the dots you didn’t realize were missing.So what happens if we stop automating one-off tasks and instead, actually map out how processes travel between modules? This is where both Power Automate and Copilot can start to untangle those hidden knots—if you know what to look for.Mapping the Friction: Where D365 Automation Breaks DownIf you’ve ever watched an invoice get approved in D365 and then just… sit there, you know exactly how frustrating real-world workflow gaps can be. The approval goes through. Everyone assumes the payment reminders will follow automatically, but nothing seems to move unless someone nudges it along. Suddenly, the finance team is answering emails about late reminders, and your customer service reps are wondering if they’re working with stale data. The approvals are technically in the system, but the next steps fall back into old habits—someone has to toggle between modules, send manual updates, or kick off emails from memory. That “single pane of glass” D365 promises feels more like a window that only opens halfway.Let’s talk about why these missed connections happen. Picture your D365 invoice approval flow. It starts with Sales—maybe someone closes a deal, and that triggers an invoice creation. Then it moves to Finance, where the invoice gets reviewed and marked as approved. After that, what’s supposed to happen? Ideally, payment reminders go out to customers, payment status updates sync up in every relevant module, and maybe Project Ops starts work if this was a billable job. The reality? At each stage, there’s usually a handoff between modules, and those don’t always map to anything automated. Instead, it’s a patchwork of “people remember to do X when Y happens,” even if there’s no system rule to enforce it.That leads to the trickiest part: the friction isn’t always where you expect. Sometimes the problem is painfully obvious—maybe you missed a trigger, or your workflow ends with a single approval but doesn’t carry information forward. Other times, the pain is subtle. D365 modules like Sales, Finance, and Operations all store similar data, but little differences in record status or naming throw off automations. You get inconsistent results, or updates that never cross module lines. The underlying issue isn’t that triggers don’t exist—it’s that they’re set up for one team, by one admin, without a real map of how the whole process should flow. Everyone makes assumptions about who does what after the handoff, and automation just falls back on manual reminders and spreadsheets to pick up the slack.Here’s a scenario that comes up all the time: An invoice gets approved in D365 Finance. The finance team is done. But over in customer service or sales ops, nobody sees the update instantly—there’s no automatic handoff to tell them it’s time to follow up with the customer. So, what happens? The customer waits. Maybe your team waits even longer while status gets updated manually in two or three different places. This is the kind of gap where things just drift—everyone thinks the system is handling it, but it’s not connecting the dots between departments.This isn’t just one or two organizations getting it wrong, either. Audits of real D365 environments keep turning up the same thing: more than 40% of approval workflows have hidden manual steps sitting right in the middle. Not at the end, not at the edge cases. They’re baked into the standard operating procedure, even after years of “automation.” Most of us are used to this by now—someone has a sticky note, or a recurring Outlook task, just to make sure what should be automatic doesn’t get lost in the shuffle. The silent delays start to look like background noise, until suddenly you’re fielding complaints about slow follow-ups or missing payments, and it all traces back to a missing bridge between steps.Imagine D365 as a subway map for your business. Each workflow is a train line; every handoff between modules is a transfer station. If every connection is smooth, the trains run on time, passengers get where they need to go. Miss a connection, though, and everything backs up. Delays become the norm, not the exception. You might not notice which transfer slowed things down, but your staff will feel the impact—chasing down approvals, cross-referencing data, or stopping to check for things that should already be in sync.Most integration pain isn’t about the sexy edge cases or show-off automations—it’s buried in those daily handoffs. Assigning a lead from Marketing to Sales sounds easy, until y

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M365 Show PodcastBy Mirko