Quarterly Asset Confirmations Run From One Workbook and a Teams Message

The Challenge

At a Fortune Global 500 manufacturer, the asset accounting group had to confirm fixed assets with department contacts every quarter. The list came from an SAP query, the contacts lived in a spreadsheet, and the cycle was hand work end to end: build a confirmation file per department, save it, write the email with the due date, chase the people who had not answered, and key every returned questionnaire back into the master list. Every quarter it pulled six to eight people into splitting the data and sending the emails, the reminders depended on someone remembering, and more than 600 returned questionnaires had to be copied back into the master list one at a time, each on the right row.

Our Approach

This was earlier work, built on the company's existing Microsoft 365 tools before we began building automation with AI. We kept the accountants in control of one Excel workbook: the assets to confirm from the SAP query on one table, the contacts by department location on another. A message in a Teams channel starts the run. Office Scripts and Power Automate create the confirmation files, save them to SharePoint folders, and email each contact from a template that states the due date. Returned confirmations are evaluated for changes and the questionnaire is ingested back into the main workbook automatically. A second Teams message sends reminders only to the contacts who have not completed theirs.

The Outcome