How to get automatic contract reminders using Microsoft 365 Business and Power Automate
It happened again! You missed the notice period of your contract. You can stop this from happening by setting up an automatic reminder notice.
Chapter 9 of the No Cost Contract Automation book shows how you can configure your existing Microsoft 365 for Business software to send notification emails. This is the most asked for feature of a contract management system. In this article we’ll take a closer look at how you can create it.
Reminder Date Column
The first thing we set up is a reminder date column in the contract data record.
In the standard No Cost Contract Automation project the reminder date is automatically set with Power Automate when we create a contract record — the default date is 60 days before the end date.
Start automated flow to send reminders
To create automated reminders we create a Power Automate “Scheduled cloud flow”. You can configure this flow to run at any time you want. In the No Cost Contract Automation project it is set to run every Monday morning at midnight.
Get the contracts that are expiring
Next in our flow we need to get the contracts that are expiring. We do this by applying an OData filter query on our Contracts list. Since the flow is scheduled to run once per week we get the contracts for the coming week.
Send email reminders
Finally we need to send an email notification to the relevant people. We dynamically extract the email of the person responsible for the contract. The email can be customized to show as little or as much information that is necessary.
That’t it, job done. Sit back and relax. The flow will run in the background until you stop it. People will grow to love your Monday morning emails. Now there are no more excuses for missing an expiry date!
You can get a copy of the flow shown in this article from here.
