Overview of Finance agents in Microsoft 365 2024 release wave 2

Overview

Microsoft 365 Copilot for Finance helps finance professionals make an impact faster by bringing insights that support strategic decision-making and reduce time spent on manual, repetitive work. Copilot empowers finance professionals to stay in the flow of work by seamlessly connecting productivity tools, such as Microsoft Excel, with existing financial systems, such as ERP, to support critical business processes and generate insights and actions in real time.

With Microsoft 365 Copilot for Finance, you can complete common financial tasks in Excel, Outlook, and Teams. This approach reduces the need to sign in to ERP systems while still maintaining financial data integrity and compliance. Copilot for Finance integrates natively with Dynamics 365 Finance ERP, Business Central, and SAP. It adapts independently to provide the flexibility to integrate with existing investments in third-party ERP and finance solutions like Oracle.

We will release Microsoft 365 Copilot for Finance for global availability as part of 2024 release wave 2. With this release, Copilot for Finance supports the collections process, variance analysis, and enables more streamlined data reconciliation.

Users can connect to Dynamics 365 Finance, Business Central, and SAP directly from Outlook for easy access to valuable insights from customer data in ERP. Users can get help when crafting email responses and save communication summaries and action items for scaled impact. Partners and customers can create connectors to other ERP systems and use them with Copilot for Finance in Outlook.

Copilot for Finance offers experiences in Teams, supporting collections calls using Teams telephony capabilities, with suggested conversation scripts based on company-defined procedures and customer financial information. Action items and follow-ups can be automatically recorded in the financial system.

In Excel, Copilot helps you reconcile your financial data and analyze variances in financial reports. Reconciliation experiences include intelligent prompts when comparing financial data structures, the ability to match the records with similar data, assisted data sanitization and preparation routines, reconciliation report creation, auto-generated insights, and suggestions on possible ways to address discrepancies. You can automatically prepare the reconciliation report summary and documented action items, and save them for future reference and audit.

You can perform variance analysis in pivot tables with time-series data. This analysis helps you identify variances using criteria you provide in natural language. It also offers detailed analysis of underlying data that explains key drivers for these variances. You can fine-tune variance analysis results using multi-turn prompts, add extra insights, and collaborate and share analysis results with stakeholders using custom report formats.

Updates to Microsoft 365 Copilot for Finance 2024 release wave 2

Investment areas

Microsoft Excel experiences
Microsoft 365 Copilot for Finance helps finance professionals work with financial data in Microsoft Excel while protecting the integrity of financial data in ERP systems. With next-generation AI support from Copilot for Finance, finance professionals can reconcile their financial data, compare financial data structures, create reconciliation reports, and troubleshoot and correct discrepancies.

To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Finance agents in Microsoft 365 below:

For application administrators

User-impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
User-impacting features should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities released to market. For the complete list, look for all features tagged “Users, automatically” in the release plan.

Features that must be enabled by application administrators
This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for all features tagged “Users by admins, makers, or analysts” in the release plan.

Get the most out of Finance agents in Microsoft 365