Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Hi everyone — I’m exploring a Power Automate solution to reduce recurring “report email” overload for our President + SVP Finance.

The problem

They receive a high volume of recurring report emails from across the org, which creates inbox overload and makes it hard to track:

what reports are expected each period

what’s been received vs missing/late

which submission/version is the current one

Goal (M365 only)

Replace ad-hoc email distribution with a centralized intake + tracking model using:

SharePoint Online (document library + lists)

Power Automate

A dedicated shared mailbox for report intake

Proposed approach

1) Report identification via bracket tokens

Submitters send reports to a single shared mailbox.

Preferred: attachment filenames include a bracket token identifying the report, e.g.

FY26 Feb Forecast [Sales Forecast].xlsx

Allowed but discouraged: email subject contains [Report Name]. If subject-token is used, assume all attachments in that email map to the same report/folder.

Token matching is case-insensitive only (no other normalization).

2) SharePoint storage structure

Store files in a library using folder pattern:

/Executive Reports/{Report Name}/{YYYY}/{MM}/

Preserve the original filename, but add a uniqueness suffix on save:

{OriginalFilename}__{SubmissionID}.{ext}

To keep month folders clean for exec browsing:
- keep only the latest accepted file in the month folder
- move prior accepted files to:
  
  /.../{YYYY}/{MM}/Archive/

“Current” is determined by the tracker link (no synthetic CURRENT file).

3) Tracker + visibility (SharePoint List)

A SharePoint List acts as a tracker: one row per report per period, including due date/time and status such as:

Missing / Late (Missing)

Received (Accepted)

Received (Unverified Sender)

Needs Review

The tracker row stores:

CurrentFileLink (always points to latest accepted submission)

SubmissionMethod = FilenameToken or SubjectToken (to measure how often subject-token is used)

4) Sender governance (“soft gate”)

A Report Catalog list contains:

Allowed Submitters (multi-select)

Escalation Managers (multi-select)

If the sender isn’t approved but the token matches a valid report:

store the file in a quarantine location and set tracker status to Received (Unverified Sender)

notify admins/owners

auto-reply to sender that it’s pending verification

We’re trying to avoid “hard rejects” to reduce bypass behavior (e.g., people emailing execs directly).

5) Flow architecture

Main flows

Intake Capture (email triggered):

On new email arrival → save attachments to quarantine + log metadata (so nothing is lost even if later steps fail).

Processing (file triggered):

On new quarantine file → extract token → route to final folder → update tracker → archive prior “current” → send confirmation.

Additional flows

Monthly setup (creates tracker rows + current month folders)

T-1 reminder and T+1 escalation (submitter reminder day before; escalation day after due date)

Watchdog/health check to detect silent failure

Questions for the community

Is this doable using standard O365 connectors (Outlook shared mailbox + SharePoint) without premium/custom code?

Any known pitfalls with:
- parsing tokens from attachment filenames reliably
- shared mailbox trigger reliability / throttling
- moving the prior “current” file to Archive (file locks / concurrency)
- idempotency (avoiding double-processing)
- Is this even feasible? Could there be issues down the line?

Any simplifications you’d recommend that don’t sacrifice durability?

Thanks in advance!

Edit / alternative idea

I also wondered if a simpler approach is:

dump all attachments into a single intake folder

use AI Builder to classify/move files automatically

I haven’t used AI Builder yet — is this feasible/reliable for this type of routing?

Categories:

Building flows

If you could fix the formatting of your post, it would be much easier to digest what you're needs are. However, I am sure what you want to do is feasible. You can use the contains() expression to get the key words out of the filenames.

Instead of folders, I would add fields to the list to store metadata so that the executives do not need to wade through folders to find older reports. Instead, I would add fields such as:

Year
Month
Report Name/Type
Status (I am not sure what you meant by this, but you could use status for it: Missing / Late (Missing), Received (Accepted), Received (Unverified Sender), Needs Review

Just be sure to index some of these so when the document library grows, the views can be filtered.