Microsoft announces Copilot for Finance to enhance financial operations

Following the release of Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service, Microsoft today announced the preview of Copilot for Finance. Copilot for Finance is targeted towards finance professionals, and it surfaces insights that reduce the time spent on manual, repetitive work. The Copilot for Finance connects with financial systems including Dynamics 365 and SAP, to provide role-specific workflow automation, guided actions, and recommendations inside Microsoft 365 Outlook and Microsoft 365 Excel. For example, you can ask questions like “help me understand forecast to actuals variance data” based on your finance data.

During the public preview phase, Copilot for Finance comes with the following features:

• Helps financial analysts quickly conduct a variance analysis in Excel using natural language prompts to review data sets for anomalies, risks and unmatched values. This type of analysis helps finance provide strategic insights to business leaders about where it is meeting, exceeding or falling short of planned financial outcomes and why.
• Simplifies the reconciliation process in Excel with automated data structure comparisons and guided troubleshooting to help move from insight to action, which helps ensure the reliability and accuracy of financial records.
• Provides a complete summary of relevant customer account details in Outlook, such as balance statements and invoices, to expedite the collections process.
• Enables customers to turn raw data in Excel into presentation-ready visuals and reports ready to be shared across Outlook and Teams.

Microsoft’s own finance organization was involved during the development of Copilot for Finance product by offering feedback on capabilities and roadmap.

You can check out the demo of Microsoft Copilot for Finance here.