Plan and prepare for Microsoft Copilot for Finance in 2024 release wave 2

Important

The 2024 release wave 2 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from October 2024 to March 2025. In this article, you'll find the product overview and what's new and planned for Microsoft Copilot for Finance.

Overview

Microsoft Copilot for Finance accelerates time-to-impact for finance professionals by surfacing 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, common financial tasks can now be completed in Excel, Outlook, and Teams to reduce the need to sign in to ERP systems, while still maintaining financial data integrity and compliance. Copilot for Finance is integrated natively within Dynamics 365 Finance ERP, Business Central, and SAP. It is independently adaptable to provide the flexibility to integrate with existing investments in third-party ERP and finance solutions like Oracle.

Microsoft Copilot for Finance will be released for global availability as a part of 2024 release wave 2. With this release, Copilot for Finance will support the collections process, variance analysis, and enable 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, 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, 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. The reconciliation report summary and documented action items are automatically prepared and available to save 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 the user can input using natural language, and detailed analysis of underlying data explaining key drivers for these variances. Users can fine-tune variance analysis results using multi-turn prompts, add additional insights, collaborate and share analysis results with stakeholders using custom report formats.

Investment areas

Microsoft Excel experiences
Microsoft Copilot for Finance helps finance professionals work with financial data in Microsoft Excel without jeopardizing financial data integrity in ERP systems. Finance professionals will be able to reconcile their financial data with next-generation AI support from Copilot for Finance to compare financial data structures, create reconciliation reports, and troubleshoot and correct discrepancies.

Microsoft Outlook experiences
Microsoft Copilot for Finance experiences in Microsoft Outlook empowers accounts receivable employees to effectively communicate with their customers. Finance professionals will be able to connect to their ERP system directly from Outlook while communicating with their customers, get valuable insights into customer data that’s in ERP, get help when crafting email responses, and save communication summaries and action items back into their ERP system.

Microsoft Teams experiences
Microsoft Copilot for Finance experiences in Microsoft Teams enables finance professionals to collaborate and communicate on financial data using Teams. Finance professionals will be able to access and interact with customer data in ERP system directly from the Teams call conversation. They will get help when organizing and planning collection activities and will be able to save communication summaries and action items back into their ERP system. Finance professionals will also be able to collaborate on macro-economic topics using Teams. Copilot for Finance will provide the user with summaries of external macroeconomic signals as well as automated monitoring, including preparing and sharing stakeholder reports on macroeconomy trends.

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

Check out the release plan

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 Microsoft Copilot for Finance

Helpful links	Description
Release plan	View all capabilities included in the release.
Licensing	Improve your understanding of how to license Microsoft Copilot for Finance.
Product documentation	Find documentation for Microsoft Copilot for Finance.
User community	Engage with Microsoft Copilot for Finance experts and peers in the community.
Upcoming events	Find and register for in-person and online events.
Product trials	Get started with Microsoft Copilot for Finance.