While I took computer science in high school and college, I never really enjoyed coding. I was always more of a hardware guy, and while I really enjoyed planning out an application, the actual nuts and bolts of the coding side were never that enjoyable to me. Hunting down that missing semi-colon or open bracket that was breaking my code was just not fun. Plus, I mostly was only working in text-based things back then, not modern GUIs. Largely my C++ and Java skills have gone unused.

When we enabled the Frontier agents in Copilot through our Microsoft Admin Center, we got access to Cowork early, but another one showed up that was equally exciting: App Builder. I started thinking, “If I could build any app, what would I build?” The answer was obvious. We needed a contract tracking system.

Ever since I switched to an unlimited support contract, I’ve struggled to get timely and relevant information about our contracts and their associated revenue. Mostly, we’ve done this through Excel sheets in multiple iterations. Our manual data entry processes usually contained some errors, and while we were able to get close, close was not good enough for me. I kept iterating on the workbooks, trying different things repeatedly. The biggest hurdle was probably our Unearned Income tracker. Since most contracts are pre-paid, I wanted to know how much we had in the bank that we hadn’t earned yet. This was always close, but rarely exact due to manual entry issues, contract variability, and other design problems.

So, I started working on the problem with App Builder. I explained how our contracts work and the metrics I needed out of them. I also asked for a quick and easy contract generation tool that would make the PDFs for me magically. We spent a lot of time going back and forth, but eventually we landed on a data model and structure and then got to work building out the interface. It was an invigorating experience, seeing my new app come to life in front of me. Are there things that we did that I would change in a future iteration? Of course! But today’s version has live data in there and we’re one-clicking contracts and amendments. Plus, I can trust the data I’m seeing. The math all works, and the reports are finally timely and accurate.

Copilot App Builder (Frontier) is available to anyone with a Copilot Business license. These start at $21 per month, per user. Data is housed in SharePoint lists, which isn’t perfect, but it is exportable to a new app if you decide to change later.

Today I started down a new path. We utilize Dynamics 365 for our support team, and one perk of that is access to the Power Apps Vibe Coder, which is currently in Preview. While it feels like App Builder on the surface, it allows you to go way deeper, bringing in sources from your Dataverse, SharePoint, and others. It exposes the code for you to make manual adjustments if needed. It’s just way more powerful across the board, while still maintaining that ease of use. I’ve started banging out a KPI tracker for myself, bringing in live data from our support, sales, and field service apps, plus some manually entered revenue tracking data since that’s not in our Dataverse just yet. Something like this would normally cost tens of thousands of dollars to have someone create, but now I’m just vibing along with it, working on it in my spare time.

To access the more powerful Power Apps Vibe Coder, you’ll need to get Power Apps Premium licenses for each team member who uses your app. These are relatively inexpensive at $20 per user, per month. Considering what I’m paying for QuickBooks, $20 per month is very affordable for a powerful tool. What will you build?

-Nate