Plan and prepare for Finance agents in Microsoft 365 in 2024 release wave 1

Overview

Microsoft Copilot for Finance helps finance professionals make an impact faster by bringing insights that support strategic decision-making and reduce the 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 the assistance of Microsoft Copilot for Finance, users can complete common financial tasks in Excel and Outlook, reducing the need to sign in to ERP systems while maintaining financial data integrity and compliance. Copilot for Finance integrates natively with Dynamics 365 Finance ERP and adapts independently to provide the flexibility to connect with existing third-party ERP and finance solutions like SAP.

Microsoft Copilot for Finance will be globally available as part of the 2024 release wave 1. With this release, Copilot for Finance supports the collections process and variance analysis, and it 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.

In Excel, users get Copilot support to reconcile their financial data and analyze variances in financial reports. Reconciliation experiences include intelligent prompts when comparing financial data structures, automated reconciliation report creation, and autogenerated insights and suggestions on possible ways to address discrepancies. You can save the reconciliation report summary and documented action items for future reference and audit. Variance analysis is available in pivot tables with time-series data and offers capabilities both to identify variances using criteria you input with natural language, and detailed analysis of underlying data explaining key drivers for these variances.

Updates to Finance agents in Microsoft 265 2024 release wave 1

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.

Microsoft Outlook experiences
Microsoft 365 Copilot for Finance experiences in Microsoft Outlook helps accounts receivable employees communicate effectively with their customers. Finance professionals can connect to their ERP system directly from Outlook while they communicate with their customers. They get valuable insights into customer data in the ERP system, get help crafting email responses, and save communication summaries and action items back into their ERP system.

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