Simple Agent Designer

Connect the Power Platform to an Agent

Trigger an Expense Agent from Power Platform

This guide walks you through building a Power Automate flow that takes a PDF receipt dropped into SharePoint and sends it to Business Central, where the Simple Agent Designer runs an Expense workload to create the accounting entry automatically. In this example, we use a SharePoint Folder as the trigger, that could be any trigger in the Power Platform that can supply a PDF file.

What you’ll build

A two-step cloud flow:

  1. Trigger — When a PDF is added to a specific SharePoint folder

  2. Business Central —

    • Create an Upload Workload record (attach the PDF)

    • Run the bound action Add workload and process to kick off the AI agent

Prerequisites

  • Business Central sandbox (or environment) with Simple Agent Designer installed

    • A Workload Type named EXPENSE (example prompt: “You will be given a PDF receipt… Post to the correct expense account and use the credit card bank account. Extract the receipt date as the posting date. Don’t use Work Date.”)

  • Power Automate access in the same tenant

  • A SharePoint site + folder where users will drop PDF receipts

  • Permissions to use the Business Central connector

Step-by-step

1) Prepare your SharePoint folder

  • Create (or choose) the folder you want users to drop PDFs into, e.g. Shared Documents/AI Work.

  • Keep it empty for testing.

2) Create the automated cloud flow

  1. In Power Automate, select Create → Automated cloud flow.
    Name it e.g. Expense – Import & Process.

  2. Trigger: choose SharePoint – When a file is created in a folder.

  3. Configure the trigger:

    • Site Address: your SharePoint site (e.g., SharePoint test)

    • Folder Id: the folder path (e.g., Shared Documents/AI Work)

Tip: If you see “Invalid parameters,” re-select the correct site and folder; it often resolves once the connection refreshes.

3) Add Business Central “Create record” (upload workload)

We’ll first create the workload record the action will be bound to.

  1. New step → Business Central → Create record.

  2. Set:

    • Environment Name: your BC environment

    • Company Name: your company

    • Clear any default /v2.0/ path if it appears in the connection details so the connector shows the right entities.

    • Table name: Simple Agent Designer – Upload Workloads (or similar “upload workloads” entity)

  3. Map fields:

    • Type → expense

    • Title → use the SharePoint File name dynamic token

    • Workload Description → leave empty (this workload will be binary-only)

    • File name → SharePoint File name

    • Content (Base64) → Click Expression, use base64( … ), then insert the trigger’s file content token.

    Common ways to supply the content:

    • If the SharePoint trigger exposes File content, use the expression:

      base64(triggerBody())

    • If File content isn’t available from the trigger in your tenant, insert an action SharePoint – Get file content (use the trigger’s Identifier), then:

      base64(body('Get_file_content')?['$content'])

    Either way, the result must be Base64 text of the PDF.

Why Base64? The Business Central API expects the binary as Base64 text for the Content field.

4) Add Business Central “Run action” (bound action)

Now that the upload record exists, run the agent on it.

  1. New step → Business Central → Run action.

  2. Set:

    • Environment Name, Company Name as before

    • Clear /v2.0/ if it reappears

    • Entity: Simple Agent Designer (same area as above)

    • Action: Add workload and process (not just “Add workload”)

  3. Bind the action to the record created in the previous step:

    • For the required SystemId (the alternative primary key in BC), select the SystemId output from the Create record step.

5) Save & test

  1. Save the flow.

  2. Click Test → Manually.

  3. In a new browser tab, upload a PDF receipt into the SharePoint folder.

  4. Return to the flow run; within a few seconds, you should see:

    • Trigger fired

    • Record created in Business Central

    • Run action succeeded

Verifying results in Business Central

  1. In Business Central, open Inbound Workloads (Simple Agent Designer area).

  2. You should see your new workload with status transitions:

    • Not Started→ Started→ Success(or error if something needs attention)

  3. Open the workload to view:

    • Summary (success/failure)

    • **Created