Budget Threshold Exceeded Alert

Overview

FlowLibs - Budget Threshold Exceeded Alert is a scheduled cloud flow that scans an Excel Online budget table once a day, computes overage percent for each line item, and — for any line item whose actual spend exceeds the configured threshold over its budgeted amount — push-notifies the finance lead with the category, amount, and overage percent and emails a styled HTML breakdown to the same recipient. End-to-end first-party connector design: Excel Online (Business) for the data read, Notifications (shared_flowpush) for the mobile push, Office 365 Outlook for the email channel. Zero HTTP fallback, zero inline fixtures.

Use Case

Finance teams own multi-line budgets that drift over the course of the fiscal year. Catching overage early — before month-end close — turns a reconciliation surprise into a same-day decision. This flow runs every morning at 09:00 ET, reads the live budget worksheet, and only fires the alert path for line items past the configured flowlibs_BudgetOveragePercent threshold (default 10%). The mobile push gives the finance lead immediate awareness; the email gives them an audit trail and a deep link back to the dashboard.

Flow Architecture

Environment Variables

Connectors & Connections

Note — All connections are referenced as solution connection references; the flow is portable between environments as long as a connection is mapped at import time.

Customization Guide

Almost every realistic variant of this flow can be implemented by changing environment variable values. A few cases require small edits inside the flow definition — those are called out explicitly below.

Alternate threshold logic

Replace Compose_Overage_Percent with a different formula (e.g., absolute dollar overage) and update Check_If_Over_Budget accordingly. Keep the env var so the threshold remains configurable.

Multi-channel routing

Add Teams PostMessageToConversation after Send_Email_To_Finance_Lead to broadcast to a finance Teams channel. Add flowlibs_TeamsGroupId and flowlibs_TeamsChannelId env vars (commonly reused across the FlowLibs catalog).

Approval workflow

Wrap the True branch in Approvals.StartAndWaitForAnApproval so the finance lead can acknowledge or escalate the overage before the alert email is sent — useful for high-dollar overages where a second pair of eyes is required.

Run-history visibility

Append a final Compose action after the For Each that emits concat('Scanned ', length(body('List_Budget_Rows_From_Excel')?['value']), ' line items, ', variables('varOverageCount'), ' over threshold.') so the run history pane shows the daily summary at a glance.

Multiple budgets

For an org with multiple budgets (department-scoped), duplicate the solution and bind each copy to a different drive/file/table via env vars. Same flow body, different inputs.

Key Expressions

The flow is intentionally light on Power Fx / WDL gymnastics — the heaviest expressions are the branch-name concatenation and the approval outcome check. They are listed below in the order they appear in the flow.

if(greater(float(coalesce(items('For_Each_Budget_Row')?['Budgeted'], 0)), 0), mul(div(sub(float(coalesce(items('For_Each_Budget_Row')?['Actual'], 0)), float(coalesce(items('For_Each_Budget_Row')?['Budgeted'], 0))), float(coalesce(items('For_Each_Budget_Row')?['Budgeted'], 1))), 100), 0)

greater(outputs('Compose_Overage_Percent'), float(variables('varBudgetOveragePercent')))

concat('Budget overage on ', coalesce(items('For_Each_Budget_Row')?['Category'], 'Unknown Category'), ': $', string(items('For_Each_Budget_Row')?['Actual']), ' actual vs $', string(items('For_Each_Budget_Row')?['Budgeted']), ' budgeted (', string(outputs('Compose_Overage_Percent')), '% over). Threshold: ', variables('varBudgetOveragePercent'), '%.')