How We Helped a Business Stop Chasing Down Missing Reports Every Monday Morning

If you manage multiple offices, franchises, or a team that submits weekly forms, you already know the drill. Monday rolls around, and someone has to figure out who did and didn't send in their paperwork. Maybe it's a deposit form, a compliance checklist, or an end-of-week report. Whatever it is, tracking it down manually takes time — and it almost always falls on the same person every single week.

We recently built an automation for exactly this problem, and it's a great example of what's possible when you let technology handle the repetitive stuff so you don't have to.

The Problem

A client had employees at different offices submitting a weekly report form through Microsoft Forms. The responses landed in an Excel file on SharePoint. Every Monday, someone had to manually cross-reference the list of active locations against the submitted responses, figure out who was missing, and send follow-up messages.

It worked — but it was tedious, error-prone, and took time that could be spent on just about anything else.

The Solution to Stop Chasing Down Missing Reports

We built a scheduled automation in Microsoft Power Automate that runs every Monday morning on its own. Here's what it does in plain English:

• Pulls the full list of active locations from Excel

• Pulls all the form responses submitted the prior week

• Compares the two lists to find any locations that didn't submit

• Sends a single summary email listing every missing location — automatically, before the workday even starts

No manual cross-referencing. No spreadsheet hunting. No forgotten follow-ups. Just a clean email waiting in the inbox when the week begins.

What This Actually Took to Build

We want to be transparent about something: automations like this aren't always plug-and-play. Getting this one right involved working through some real technical challenges — the kind that only show up once you're testing against live data.

We ran into issues with how Power Automate handles date comparisons, how it reads data types from Excel, and how filter steps behave differently when they're nested inside loops. Each of those required careful troubleshooting, not just copying a template.

That's actually the most important thing we can tell you about automation work: the value isn't just in knowing how to set it up — it's in knowing how to fix it when it doesn't work the way it should. Anyone can follow a tutorial. Fewer people can systematically diagnose why a flow is failing at step six and rebuild it correctly.

Why This Matters for Your Business

If your team is doing any of the following manually each week, there's a good chance we can automate it:

• Checking who submitted a form, report, or file by a deadline

• Sending reminder or summary emails based on what is or isn't in a spreadsheet

• Compiling data from multiple sources into a single report

• Flagging missing entries, overdue items, or incomplete records

In many cases, you don't need a big IT department or expensive software to stop chasing down missing reports. If your business already uses Microsoft 365 — Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams — the tools to build these automations are likely already included in what you're paying for.

Our automations may not look this cool, but they sure do feel that way to us when we streamline a task!

Let's Talk About What We Can Automate for You

Every business has at least a few of these weekly or monthly tasks that run on someone's time and attention when they really shouldn't have to. We'd love to take a look at yours.

Reach out and tell us what you're doing manually right now. We'll let you know whether it's something we can take off your plate — and what that would actually look like in practice.