Case Study:Streamlining Legal Invoicing and Project Workflows using Microsoft Power Platform
A legal and governance team within a council needed to reduce time spent on manual invoicing and project administration. By building low‑code solutions on Microsoft Power Platform, they automated key steps in legal invoicing and project workflows, freeing staff to focus on higher‑value work and improving visibility over matters and spend.
Client overview
The client is a metropolitan council with an in‑house legal team and project officers supporting infrastructure, planning, and community initiatives. Legal staff manage a mix of internal matters and external panel firms, while project officers oversee contracts, variations, and milestones across dozens of concurrent projects. Invoicing, approvals, and project tracking had grown increasingly complex as the volume of work increased. Council leadership wanted faster, more accurate processes without adding extra headcount or introducing multiple new systems.
Challenges
Legal and project teams relied heavily on email, spreadsheets, and manual data entry to manage invoices, approvals, and project updates. Matching legal invoices to matters and budgets required repetitive checking and re‑keying of information, increasing the risk of errors and delays in payments. Project status reporting was time‑consuming, with information scattered across emails, shared drives, and isolated registers that were often out of date. There was limited real‑time visibility into commitments, spend against budget, and the progress of key legal and project workflows.
Our solution
We designed and implemented a suite of Power Platform solutions centred on Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI, integrated with Microsoft 365. A custom Power App was created for legal invoicing, allowing staff to log matters, allocate invoices to the correct matter and cost centre, and capture key metadata in a structured way. Power Automate flows were introduced to route invoices and project‑related approvals to the right managers based on defined rules, automatically notifying approvers and tracking their decisions. Project workflows were standardised using automated forms and checklists, with status updates and milestones captured in a central data source to feed visual dashboards.
Client experience
Legal and project staff now submit and approve invoices and project changes through simple, guided screens instead of long email chains and spreadsheets. Approvers receive clear, actionable requests with all supporting information in one place, and can approve or query items from within familiar Microsoft 365 tools. Team members spend less time chasing updates, because workflow status is visible at a glance and reminders are handled automatically. The legal team, project office, and finance work from a shared, real‑time view of matters, approvals, and spend.
Acting Manager | WhiteHorse Council
Outcomes
Invoice processing times were significantly reduced, with fewer errors and less rework due to standardised data capture and automated routing. The council gained better control and auditability over legal and project‑related spending, with clear records of approvals and supporting documentation. Managers and executives can monitor workload, pipeline, and budget performance through Power BI dashboards built on the same underlying data. Overall, the council’s legal and project functions became more efficient, transparent, and responsive, demonstrating the practical benefits of automation with Microsoft Power Platform.