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

Important

The 2024 release wave 1 plan covers all new functionalities planned for release from April 2024 to September 2024. In this article, you find the product overview and the new and planned features for Finance agents in Microsoft 365.

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.

Investment areas

Microsoft Excel experiences
Microsoft 365 Copilot for Finance helps finance professionals work with financial data in Microsoft Excel without jeopardizing financial data integrity in ERP systems. Finance professionals can 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 365 Copilot for Finance experiences in Microsoft Outlook empower accounts receivable employees to communicate effectively with their customers. Finance professionals can 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.

To learn more about the capabilities delivered in this release wave, check out the release plan for Finance agents in Microsoft 365:

Check out the release plan

For application administrators

User-impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
Application administrators should review user-impacting features. This review process helps with release change management and supports successful onboarding of new capabilities. For the complete list, see all features tagged "Users, automatically" in the release plan.

Features that application administrators must enable
This release wave contains features that administrators, makers, or business analysts must enable or configure for their users. For the complete list, see all features tagged "Users by admins, makers, or analysts" in the release plan.

Get the most out of Finance agents in Microsoft 365

Helpful links	Description
Release plan	View all capabilities included in the release.
Licensing	Learn how to license Finance agents in Microsoft 365.
Product documentation	Find documentation for Finance agents in Microsoft 365.
User community	Engage with Finance agents in Microsoft 365 experts and peers in the community.
Upcoming events	Find and register for in-person and online events.
Product trials	Get started with Finance agents in Microsoft 365.