Manage expenses in Business Central using Expense Agent

Enabled for	Public preview	General availability
Users, automatically	May 8, 2026	-

Business value

The Expense Agent transforms expense management into a fully automated, AI-driven process. It eliminates manual entry, reduces errors, and accelerates reimbursement cycles. By integrating with Outlook, Teams, Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, and Business Central, the agent enables employees to easily submit expenses while ensuring compliance with company policies. Businesses gain efficiency, improved accuracy, and real-time visibility into expense data, freeing finance teams to focus on strategic tasks.

Feature details

Most companies, regardless of size, incur expenses for travel, office supplies, meals, per diem, and more. Without a structured process, these costs are hard to track, which can lead to errors, compliance risks, and wasted time. Integrated expense management ensures transparency, accurate reporting, and better financial control.

Adding Expense Agent to this process brings faster processing and automation plus fraud prevention and compliance, saving employees significant time and improving accuracy and quality for the company.

Expense Agent focuses on:

• End-to-end automation: Captures receipts through email, camera, or direct communication, uses a language model to extract details such as expense categories, and then generates reports automatically.
• AI-driven intelligence: Detects anomalies and duplicates, finds participants/guests for morale or entertainment events, automatically itemizes expenses, and does per diem calculations.
• Integration points: Works across a web app, Outlook, and Copilot Chat, with Business Central handling posting and the resulting ledger entries.
• Approval workflow: Supports interim and final approvals, policy validation, and reminders.

This release introduces a new web app for the Expense Agent, enabling users to submit expenses either through the web app or directly from Outlook. The agent automatically extracts information from scanned receipts or receipts forwarded via email, creates Expenses, and populates key fields such as category, amount, currency, merchant, payment method, date, receipt number, and a context‑based description. When applicable, the agent itemizes expenses and even identifies per diem claims based on itinerary documents. Users can associate expenses with projects or mark them as billable.

The agent groups expenses within a defined time period into an Expense Report and can automatically submit it for approval when approvals are enabled and no rule violations are detected. A redesigned approval experience supports approvers and prepares expense reports for posting.

To get started, activate the Expense Agent and run Configure Expense Agent. This guided setup walks you step by step through all required configuration, including Expense Categories, Expense Subcategories, Expense Posting Groups, and other supporting lists needed for day‑to‑day use.

Once the setup is complete, you’ll receive a link to the web app where you can upload your receipts. From there, the agent takes over and autonomously performs receipt extraction, categorization, and itemization of expenses, creating Expense Reports based on them.

Availability

Public preview is available in English and in the US only, but following with these countries/regions in July 2026:

• Australia
• New Zealand
• UK

Geographic areas

Visit the Explore Feature Geography report for Microsoft Azure areas where this feature is planned or available.

Language availability

Visit the Explore Feature Language report for information on this feature's availability.

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