Leave requests: from lost paper forms to a 4-hour turnaround.
At a services company of 200+ employees, paper leave forms passed desk to desk — regularly lost, with approvals taking 3–5 days. At the end of the trail, HR retyped everything into a spreadsheet nobody trusted.
The slowest part of taking a day off was the form.
Booking leave started with a paper form and ended, 3–5 days later, with an answer — if the form survived the journey. It travelled desk to desk: from the employee to their manager, from the manager's in-tray onward to HR. Any absence, busy week or misplaced pile along the way stalled it, and forms were regularly lost outright. When that happened, the employee found out only by asking, filled the form in again, and the wait started over.
While a request was in transit, it was invisible. An employee who needed to confirm travel plans had no way to check where their form was or who had it — the only status tracker was walking over and asking. Managers, meanwhile, had no view of what they had already approved when the next form landed, because the paper they signed was already on its way to another desk.
The paperwork didn't end with the approval. Every signed form was retyped by HR into a spreadsheet — the company's only record of who was off when and how much leave anyone had left. Between the retyping, the lost forms and requests still sitting in trays, nobody trusted its numbers, and questions about leave balances came back to HR to be answered by hand.
A canvas app in three weeks, on licenses they already had.
We replaced the paper form with a Power Apps canvas app built on SharePoint lists — data and app living entirely inside the Microsoft 365 tenant the company already pays for. Built and launched in three weeks, with zero extra licensing.
The paper form became a canvas app: employees pick dates and a leave type, and the request is saved to a SharePoint list the moment it's submitted. Nothing to print, nothing to walk anywhere, nothing to lose.
Each request routes automatically to the right manager for a decision — approve or decline, with the outcome written back to the list. The desk-to-desk journey is gone, and every request shows where it stands.
The app shows employees their leave balance as they request, and it updates as requests are approved. The retyped spreadsheet is retired — and so are the walk-up balance questions HR used to answer by hand.
Managers are notified of new requests in Microsoft Teams, where they already work, and employees are notified the moment a decision is made — no chasing, no asking, no forms sitting unseen in trays.
What changed.
No vanity metrics — these are the three numbers the engagement was measured on.
Which paper form is slowing your team down?
Book a free 30-minute audit — we'll pick the process that hurts most and show you what replacing it with a Power App on your existing licenses would take.