Avoid these pitfalls to build faster, more reliable, and compliant document workflows in Microsoft 365.
Document automation is one of the quickest wins in any Microsoft 365 workflow strategy, but without the right approach, it can also lead to confusing flows, unreliable outputs, and frustrated users.
Whether you’re generating contracts, invoices, reports, or letters, here are the 10 most common document automation mistakes, and how Encodian Flowr helps you avoid them.
The problem:
Still using a manual “copy and paste” approach to duplicate Word or Excel templates before each use? This invites inconsistencies, broken formatting, and version control issues.
Why it matters:
Manually modified templates are hard to track, difficult to secure, and often break when reused.
The Solution:
Use ‘Populate’ actions for Word, PowerPoint, and Excel with a stored SharePoint or OneDrive template. It pulls a clean, controlled file every time, no duplication or edits required.
The problem:
If users can modify templates freely, branding, headers, fonts, or logos may change, either by accident or design.
Why it matters:
Inconsistent branding undermines trust, especially in customer- or regulator-facing documents.
The Solution:
Use ‘Secure’ actions for Word, Excel, and PDF, or the PDF – Set Privileges action to lock templates and final outputs. This prevents unauthorised changes while ensuring brand consistency across every document.
The problem:
Some teams bake static names, labels, or contract terms directly into templates or flows instead of dynamically inserting them.
Why it matters:
Every time a change is needed (e.g. a new legal clause or updated job title), you need to edit the template, or worse, the flow.
The Solution:
Use placeholders like <<[ClientName]>> as found in our Template Library, then dynamically populate with our ‘Populate’ actions for Word, PowerPoint, and Excel using JSON or SharePoint data. This ensures templates are flexible, reusable, and easy to maintain.
The problem:
Documents created in bulk often lack metadata such as author, status, project ID, or retention label.
Why it matters:
Without metadata, you can’t manage documents effectively in SharePoint, or meet compliance and search requirements.
The Solution:
Use ‘Set Metadata’ actions for PDF and Word. Flowr lets you programmatically tag documents as part of the generation process, ensuring every file is trackable and policy-compliant.
The problem:
Many teams generate PDFs without considering long-term storage or legal compliance.
Why it matters:
Standard PDFs aren’t guaranteed to be readable in 5+ years. In regulated industries, this can be a serious issue.
The Solution:
Use Convert – PDF to PDFA, which creates ISO-standard, archive-ready documents. Perfect for records, reports, and regulated submissions.
The problem:
Documents might contain personal data, confidential clauses, or internal notes that shouldn’t be visible.
Why it matters:
Failing to redact sensitive data can violate GDPR, HIPAA, or internal privacy standards.
The Solution:
Use the PDF – Redact action to anonymise documents before sending to protect privacy and reduce risk in every output.
The problem:
Using an ‘Apply to Each’ loop to generate documents one-by-one seems simple, but it slows flows down, causes failures, and risks hitting API limits.
Why it matters:
If you’re generating 50–500+ documents, a loop-based approach may crash or severely degrade performance.
The Solution:
Use batch-friendly actions like PDF – Merge Files or check out our Array actions in our Utility Connector to handle multiple documents in one go. These actions reduce complexity, improve speed, and are built for scale.
The problem:
Flows that lack error checks may fail silently—producing broken or incomplete documents without warning.
Why it matters:
This causes support headaches, erodes user trust, and delays delivery.
The Solution:
Use Flowr’s Validation Utility Actions (for JSON, GUID, Email Addresses, Text Layers, URL Availability and URL Syntax) to catch errors early. Scope actions also help group and manage failures without stopping the entire flow.
The problem:
Dates and number formats may display incorrectly across regions if culture settings are ignored.
Why it matters:
Sending a UK date format to a US client, or the wrong decimal separator, can cause confusion or legal risk.
The Solution:
Use Culture Names, the Utility – Convert Time Zone action, and date formatting options to localise every document. Especially useful in international and multi-lingual flows. Flowr even has AI ‘Translation’ actions for files, and a single or multiple strings.
The problem:
Flows are often tested with a single record. But in production, hundreds of records or large datasets cause performance issues that weren’t caught.
Why it matters:
Documents may break, exceed size limits, or expose edge cases when operating at scale.
The Solution:
Test with real data and simulate load using Flowr’s scalable processing (up to 70MB per action). Use array inputs to stress-test templates, validate formatting, and ensure smooth performance before go-live. You can even check out our Developer Subscription which allows you to have full access to Flowr actions in a non-production environment for half the price of a regular Flowr subscription.
Every automation mistake costs time, clarity, and trust. The good news? They’re all avoidable. With Encodian Flowr, you can automate documents with speed, scale, and certainty, no matter your complexity or compliance needs.
Content Marketing Manager
