What is Copilot for Finance? All You Need To Know

Microsoft recently announced the public preview of Microsoft Copilot for Finance. This latest Copilot surfaced insights that reduce the time spent on manual, repetitive work. Copilot for Finance integrates Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service, revolutionising how finance teams approach their daily tasks.

This article will uncover all about latest Copilot and how it transforms the way finance works.

What is Copilot for Finance?

Copilot for Finance is the next-generation AI assistant for finance professionals. It streamlines financial processes and surfaces insights for better-informed decision-making. 

Adopting AI and automation tools has long been a top priority for Microsoft’s elite finance team, which does this to modernize operations, lower financial risk, and provide strategic insights to support the company’s priorities. 

According to Cory Hrncirik, Modern Finance Lead, Microsoft, “Our finance organization is just like any other looking for technology to help us do our work in a more efficient and impactful way, and we’re excited to track our journey as customer zero of Microsoft Copilot for Finance.”

The latest Work Trend Index survey revealed that people are drowning in data. Copilot helps break down information and application silos while actively deriving insights, recommendations, and guidance from a variety of data sources, all under Microsoft’s responsible AI principles.

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Copilot for Finance includes Copilot for Microsoft 365, which means it supercharges Excel, Outlook, and other widely used productivity apps with workflow and data-specific insights for the finance professional.

Microsoft Excel

When working with financial data in Microsoft Excel, finance professionals can accomplish common financial tasks like data reconciliation with the aid of Microsoft Copilot for Finance. It compares financial data structures, generates summaries supported by generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), classes transactions, and recommends reconciliation vectors.

Microsoft Outlook

Copilot for Finance enables routine financial tasks, like collections, in Outlook, eliminating the need to log into ERP systems and preserving the integrity and compliance of financial data. The prebuilt integrations, such as email composition and summarization, are available in this copilot tool.

What are the features of Microsoft Copilot for Finance?

According to Microsoft’s official blog, Copilot for Finance introduces several key features to enhance financial operations:

• It 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.
• To expedite the collection process, provide a complete summary of relevant customer account details in Outlook, such as balance statements and invoices.
• It enables customers to turn raw data in Excel into presentation-ready visuals and reports ready to be shared across Outlook and Teams.

What is Copilot Pro? Plan, Pricing, Features & More

Microsoft Copilot for Finance is a fresh experience for Microsoft 365 that unlocks AI-assisted competencies for financial professionals, right from within productivity applications they use every day.

Now available in public preview, Copilot for Finance connects to the organization’s financial systems, including Dynamics 365 and SAP, to provide role-specific workflow automation, guided actions, and recommendations in Microsoft Outlook, Excel, Microsoft Teams, and other Microsoft 365 applications.

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