Automate the report someone rebuilds from memory every month

Ask "what should we automate first" and people reach for the biggest, scariest process in the building. Wrong place to start. The best first project is smaller and much easier to find: the report someone rebuilds from memory every month, and has stopped mentioning because it's just what they do now.

You'll recognise it by three things:

• It runs on a fixed schedule - first of the month, every Friday - not triggered by anything.
• It pulls from the same two or three sources every time: an export, a filtered view, a copy-paste into a template.
• Nobody's ever asked for it to be automated, because at some point it stopped feeling like work and started feeling like a habit.

That's exactly the profile that automates cleanly: known trigger, known inputs, known output. A Power Automate flow (or a scheduled export plus a template) that runs the same steps on the same schedule takes the risk of a missed month, a copy-paste error, or someone being on leave clean off the table.

Before you build it, ask the person who currently does it two things: what would they check before trusting a number in it, and what's the one time it went wrong. Both answers tell you exactly what the automated version needs to get right - and where to put the error trap.

The manual version has been working fine, which is exactly why nobody's touched it. That's not a reason to leave it - it's the reason it's the cheapest place to start.