Dynamics | Adding SMS to your Power Automate Workflows

If you're using Microsoft Power Automate (formerly Microsoft Flows) in your business, you may like to add SMS as an action to your workflows.

Now, there are a couple of little things we need to address before we do this:

• You will need to create the SMS for Power Automate API connection first - this article can show you how to do that.
• The very first time you add the SMS action to a flow, you'll be asked to provide API credentials for your messaging provider. To create a new API key and secret, just follow the steps in this article and save your API key and secret somewhere safe until you're prompted to input the API credentials. You'll only need to do this once, and we'll touch on this in Step 5 below.

Now that we've got that out of the way, let's look at adding the SMS action to a workflow:

1. Open Power Automate and go to My Flows, then you can either create a New Flow, or you can click on an existing workflow name and click Edit:

2. From within the flow, choose where you want to add the SMS action and click on New step:

3. Select the Custom tab and click on the SMS for Power Automate connector:

4. Then click the Send SMS action:

5. Now, remember the API credentials we mentioned at the beginning of the article? So the very first time you add the Send SMS action to a workflow, here is when you'll be asked to enter the API key and secret: 

Like we said though, you'll only need to do this once.

6. Next, in the message configurator, select your Messaging Service from the dropdown and enter the details of your message in the To and Message fields:

7. When you've finished configuring your workflow just click Save and you're done, and remember to test out your flow to make sure you receive the SMS and everything is set up properly.

Important Things to remember when using SMS for Power Automate:

• Make sure when you enter the recipient's phone number that there's no spaces in the number (e.g. like this: 040011122, not like this: 0400 111 222), because the system identifies a space as separating different phone numbers for different recipients.
• You can send bulk SMS through SMS for Power Automate by adding a space, comma or period followed by the next person’s mobile number.
• You can send messages internationally, as long as your messaging provider allows for this. You’ll need to use international format for the number, eg. +61400111222.
• We recommend adding all the numbers in international format to make sure the message is sent correctly.
• SMS messages may take up to a minute to receive depending on handset and internet connectivity.