Your field crews fill in tickets on paper or in a spreadsheet. Someone at head office retypes them. Approvals sit in email threads with twelve people on cc. When an auditor or a customer asks for one ticket from last March, someone spends half an hour on the VPN and the phone tracking it down.
We fix that for Calgary companies with Power Apps, Power Automate and Power BI, built on the Microsoft 365 tenant you already have.
How Bonanza Drilling got its field paperwork off paper
Bonanza Drilling is an Alberta drilling contractor with its head office in Brooks and an office in Calgary. Its field paperwork lived on paper and in disconnected forms.
We built Canvas Apps on Dataverse for field tickets, HSE checklists and payroll export. The results:
- 25+ paper forms retired
- Data retrieval cut from about 30 minutes to instant
- 50+ legacy InfoPath and Nintex forms rebuilt in Power Apps and Power Automate
- 20+ separate checklist forms replaced by one reusable checklist control, with the questions stored in Dataverse
Crews enter data on site, including offline. Managers at head office see it as soon as it syncs, without phoning the rig.
Processes we take off spreadsheets and email
These usually come up first:
- Field tickets. Crews capture hours, equipment and materials on a phone or tablet, and the ticket reaches the office ready to bill.
- Approvals. A supervisor signs off a ticket, a JSA or a purchase in one place, with a record of who approved what and when.
- Timesheets. Hours flow from the field straight into payroll export, so nobody retypes them.
- Safety forms. Crews complete JSA, FLHA and inspection checklists on site, and HSE managers can report on them from one store.
Drilling and service companies can see our drilling field operations work.
Remote Alberta sites need one extra design choice. Power Automate flows don’t run inside an app while it’s offline, so we trigger approvals when a Dataverse record changes to “Submitted”. That happens when the device syncs.
Rule of thumb: if crews work anywhere without reliable signal, plan on Dataverse from day one. Moving a live app off SharePoint lists later costs more than starting right.
Choosing between Dataverse and SharePoint lists
SharePoint lists come with Microsoft 365, which makes them tempting for a first app, and they suit some jobs well. The choice decides how far the app can grow.
| SharePoint lists | Dataverse | |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Simple trackers, low volume, office users | Field apps, related records, growing data |
| Built-in canvas app offline | No | Yes, with automatic sync |
Watch delegation too. When a canvas app query can’t be pushed down to the data source, Power Apps processes only the first 500 records by default and ignores the rest. A proof of concept runs fine with 200 test tickets, then returns wrong answers a year later. Dataverse supports more query features, so fewer queries hit that limit.
We move existing list and Excel apps onto Dataverse.
Power BI reporting for head office
Once field data lands in Dataverse, head office can see it in Power BI: tickets awaiting approval, hours by job, overdue inspections, safety observations by site. One live report replaces the weekly spreadsheet someone builds by hand. See how we approach operational dashboards.
What the licences cost now
Budgets are often built on old prices. These are current list prices in USD, per user per month on annual terms:
| Licence | Price | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Power Apps Premium | $20 | Rises to $22 on 1 January 2027; existing terms keep their price until renewal |
| Power Apps per app | Depends on channel | End of sale in January 2026 for most new buyers; CSP and EA renewals keep it |
| Power Apps pay-as-you-go | $10 per active user per app | |
| Power Automate Premium | $15 | |
| Power BI Pro | $14 | Included in Microsoft 365 E5 |
| Power BI Premium Per User | $24 |
Microsoft 365 licences don’t include the right to run Dataverse apps, so every field user on a Dataverse app needs a Power Apps plan. One licensing analyst reports that from February 2027, users without the right licence will be blocked from opening affected apps. Check your counts before then.
We size licensing during scoping, so the build and the budget match.
Documents, records and the rest of your tenant
Downtown teams still need clean document management alongside the field apps: deal rooms, JV document exchange, Board packs, records under retention. For file server and legacy SharePoint migrations, DMS design and permissions clean-up, see SharePoint consulting in Calgary. You can also read the DMS metadata guide or read the sensitivity labels guide.
Finance teams can look at our payroll and accounting workflows. Planning a move off legacy file shares? Read the migration guide, or see our oil and gas work.
Where we work in and around Calgary
We work throughout the Calgary area, within about 200 km of the city:
- Calgary and nearby: Airdrie, Cochrane, Okotoks, Chestermere
- Foothills and mountains: Canmore, Black Diamond, High River
- Southern Alberta: Brooks
- Central Alberta: Red Deer
Most engagements run hybrid. Workshops and discovery happen on site in Calgary and the build is remote. Demos and rollout come back on site, in front of the crews and supervisors who will use the apps.
What happens after you get in touch
You get a written response within one business day of first contact. Instead of a discovery deck, we ask about your pain points and your timeline. Then we give you a candid read on what we’d do, what you already have to build on, and what would be wasted effort.
From signed scope to first usable build is typically four to eight weeks, depending on the surface area. If you’re earlier than that, still scoping the problem or mapping who owns what, start with a 45-minute call with a senior consultant.
Book a call with a senior consultant to talk through your field tickets, approvals or timesheets.