Finance departments play a crucial role in shaping a company's direction, yet many face challenges in dedicating time to strategic work due to repetitive data entry and review tasks. Copilot for Finance aims to alleviate this burden by streamlining financial processes, automating workflows, and providing insights, enabling finance professionals to focus more on delivering valuable counsel and insights to the business. Copilot for Finance joins Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service, now generally available.
The new product 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. The solution draws on essential context from one’s existing financial data sources, including traditional Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 and SAP, and the Microsoft Graph.
Key features that enhance financial operations:
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.
The Copilot offerings designed for business functions help workers tackle a common problem: getting from insights to impact – with the relevant data and workflows specific to their roles. The Work Trend Index survey revealed that people are drowning in data. Roughly a quarter of their day is spent searching for information – roughly 50% of the information they consume each day is deemed necessary for their job, and a recent survey found roles like sales, finance, and supply chain have role-specific needs from their data.
Copilot helps break down information and application silos while actively deriving insights, recommendations, and guidance from a variety of data sources — all in accordance with Microsoft’s responsible AI principles. With Microsoft Copilot Studio, businesses can further customise Copilot for business processes inside of Copilot for Microsoft 365 and its role-based extensions.
As per the press release, companies of all sizes are moving beyond AI experimentation and embracing Microsoft Copilot to strategically augment those closest to their customer interactions and critical operations to create new business value.
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