I Built a Full IT Ticket System in Power Apps — Here's the SLA Engine That Runs Without Power Automate

I recently built a complete IT ticket management system in Power Apps — 9 screens, role-based access, live SLA tracking, and automatic email notifications. The part I want to actually talk about here isn't the UI, it's the SLA engine, because I built it to work without Power Automate , and the trick is simpler than it looks. The problem SLA tracking normally means: a ticket is "Critical" → 60 minute target → somebody needs to know if it's about to breach or already has. The obvious way to do this is a scheduled Power Automate flow that checks every ticket on a timer and flags the ones in trouble. I wanted this app to run on Power Apps collections only — no flow, no external data source — so a scheduled flow wasn't an option. The question was: can you get "live" SLA status without a background job? The trick: recalculate on every read, not on a timer Instead of a flow updating a SLAStatus field periodically, I recalculate it every time the app or a screen is opened, using Now() against the stored due date: \ UpdateIf( colTickets, Status <> "Resolved" && Status <> "Closed", { SLAStatus: If( Now() > DueDate, "Breached", DateDiff(Now(), DueDate, TimeUnit.Minutes) <= SLAMinutes * 0.2, "At Risk", "On Track" ) } ); UpdateIf(colTickets, Status = "Resolved" || Status = "Closed", {SLAStatus: "Met"}) \ \ This runs in App.OnStart , at the top of every screen's OnVisible , and behind a manual "Refresh SLA" button. The At Risk threshold is 20% of the SLA window remaining — so a Critical ticket (60 min target) goes At Risk with 12 minutes left; a Low ticket (1440 min / 24 hrs) goes At Risk with 4.8 hours left. The honest tradeoff: this only updates when someone has the app open. A ticket breaching at 2am with nobody looking won't trigger anything until the next visit. For a real production deployment I'd pair this with a scheduled flow for after-hours detection — but for a demo, an internal tool with regular traffic, or anything where "eventually consistent within the next visit"