Automating employee requests: leave, business trips, equipment and expenses without email or paper

Take a hypothetical trading company with 80 employees. An employee emails their manager to ask for leave. The manager replies two days later, the employee forwards the reply to HR, and someone in HR enters the leave in a spreadsheet. Once a month someone compares the spreadsheet with the payroll and sorts out the discrepancies.

Each step takes only a moment, but there are many requests. Let us make a rough estimate. If each of the 80 employees submits 8 leave requests a year, that is about 53 requests a month. Add, for example, 15 business trips, 5 equipment orders and 30 expense claims, and you have about 100 requests in total.

Assuming each request takes a total of 15 minutes of several people’s time, the company loses about 25 hours a month, or 300 hours a year. At PLN 70 an hour, that is about PLN 21,000 a year. Plug in your own figures: requests per month × minutes per request × hourly cost.

To be fair, working time alone is rarely the biggest cost. Errors are more of a nuisance: leave that never reached HR, a business trip settled two months later, a laptop ordered without the budget holder’s approval. On top of that, the manager does not know who in the team will be away next week.

The four requests differ in how often they occur and how many rules they involve. Choose the order so that the first workflow shows results quickly and teaches the company a new habit. You will find a comparison in the table below.

In most companies, leave is the best place to start. Business trips and expenses have more rules and need to be agreed with the accountant, so it is better to build them on a proven pattern. The exception: if the company has many field salespeople, expense claims may be a bigger problem than leave.

The employee opens the form on a computer or phone, chooses the type of leave and the dates, and the form immediately shows how many days they have left. Once it is submitted, Power Automate sends the request to the line manager. The manager receives a card in Teams or Outlook with “Approve” and “Reject” buttons and a comment field.

After approval, several things happen at once without anyone’s involvement. The list below shows a typical set of steps.

Polish law does not require a paper request. Leave records must, however, be kept separately for each employee, and in electronic form their integrity, attribution to the right person and secure storage must be ensured. For people employed since 2019, employee records are generally kept for 10 years from the end of the year in which employment ended.

A business trip has two stages, so it makes sense to handle it with a single request that the employee completes on their return. Before leaving, the employee enters the purpose, destination, dates, means of transport and any advance. The line manager approves the trip, and for larger amounts so does the budget holder.

On return, the employee opens the same request and adds photos of tickets, hotel bills and receipts. The form calculates daily allowances from the departure and return times and deducts the advance. The accountant receives a complete claim instead of an envelope full of documents.

Daily allowances and flat-rate amounts are set by a government regulation, and the rates change every few years. Keep the rates in a separate table that HR can update without rebuilding the app. Private companies may set their own rules in their pay regulations or employment contracts. However, the allowance for a domestic trip cannot be lower than in the regulation. The form must then calculate exactly according to the company’s rules.

Business trips have the most exceptions: foreign travel, use of a private car, meals provided that reduce the allowance. Do not try to cover everything from day one. Start with domestic trips and let the accountant settle rare cases manually until you see how often they happen.

Without a catalogue, every laptop order starts with questions: which model, how much memory, who pays? With a catalogue, the employee or their manager chooses one of a few approved configurations and the form shows the price straight away. Based on that, the workflow selects the person who approves the expense.

Set the thresholds yourself, for example: up to PLN 5,000 the department manager approves, above that the CFO. After approval, the IT person receives a task to prepare the equipment and purchasing receives an order for the supplier. The equipment is recorded in an inventory assigned to the employee.

This inventory is useful when an employee leaves. HR can see immediately what needs to be collected, and the IT person knows which accounts to disable. So it is worth linking equipment orders to the employee onboarding and offboarding process.

The employee takes a photo of the receipt with their phone straight after the purchase. The AI Builder receipt model, Microsoft’s ready-made tool for reading text from images (OCR), extracts the date, merchant, amount and tax. It supports Polish, but every field should be shown to the employee to check before submitting.

The employee selects the project or department the expense belongs to and submits the request. The line manager approves it in Teams, and the accountant receives the full set: the photo, the data and the decision. The reimbursement can go into the next payroll or be paid by bank transfer.

Remember KSeF, Poland’s National e-Invoicing System: the government platform through which, since 1 February 2026, companies receive invoices from Polish sellers. If the employee asks for an invoice in the company’s name, it will usually arrive through KSeF and does not need to be retyped from a photo. However, until the end of 2026 some invoices issued from cash registers may still be created outside KSeF.

The photo and data extraction are still needed for receipts, expenses abroad and documents that are not invoices. Add a field to the form for the KSeF invoice number, so the accountant can link the expense to the document already in the system.

Most Microsoft 365 business plans include limited rights to Power Apps and Power Automate. These are enough when the workflow uses Microsoft 365 data, such as SharePoint, Outlook and Teams, and standard connectors to other services.

The line is drawn at premium connectors, for example to an SQL database or an HR system. When a Power Apps app uses such a connector, every user of the app needs a paid licence, not just its creator. According to Microsoft’s price list, Power Apps Premium costs USD 20 per user per month. Since 2 January 2026, the cheaper per-app licence is no longer available to new customers through some sales channels.

Receipt reading with AI Builder is charged separately: from 1 November 2026 it is billed in Copilot credits, which the company buys on top. If you process many documents, check this cost before the rollout. You will find a full comparison of the options in the table below.

A workflow that ends in a SharePoint list solves half the problem. If HR still has to retype leave into the HR system, the errors simply move somewhere else. So check at the outset how your HR system accepts data: through a connector, a file import or manual entry.

Requests contain personal data, so GDPR rules apply. Only the employee, their line manager and HR should have access to the register. Do not collect information you do not need in the form – for example, record the reason for special leave as a category, not as details of health or family matters.

Before going live, show the workflow to the person responsible for data protection and to the chief accountant. Together, confirm where the requests are stored, who can see them and how long they remain in the system.

The rollout works best in stages, one request at a time. Finish each stage by comparing the results with your baseline measurement, so you know whether the change has made a difference. The steps below work in most companies.

The most common mistake is starting with business trips because they are the most irritating. But they have the most rules and it is easy to get stuck. The second mistake is keeping the old route “just in case” – if requests by email still work, some people will never switch to the form.