As part of its continuous effort to incorporate generative artificial intelligence across various domains, Microsoft recently introduced the public preview of Copilot for Finance on Thursday. This tool is designed to assist finance professionals in tasks like analyzing sales variances, expediting collections, and locating missing invoices.
Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s chief vice president of business applications and platforms, highlighted in a blog post that “Sixty-two percent of finance professionals express being trapped in the monotony of data entry and review cycles.” He emphasized how Copilot for Finance can alleviate this burden by streamlining financial tasks, automating workflows, and offering valuable insights to empower finance teams to take on a more strategic role in advising the business.
The software facilitates variance analysis in sales, providing a natural-language summary pinpointing where actual sales might deviate from projected figures along with the underlying reasons for the variance. By leveraging natural language prompts, the program swiftly conducts a variance analysis in Excel, scrutinizing data sets for anomalies, risks, and unmatched values. This analysis enables finance professionals to furnish business leaders with strategic insights regarding their financial performance.
Through suggested prompts like “help me understand forecast to actuals variance data,” users can extract data directly from ERP and financial system records for analysis. This capability streamlines audits, enhances collections by automating communication and payment plans, and expedites financial reporting by effortlessly identifying discrepancies.
Emily He, Microsoft’s head of business applications marketing, elaborated on the program’s functionalities, stating that Copilot for Finance streamlines audits, revolutionizes collections, and accelerates financial reporting processes. The tool simplifies tasks such as reconciling data, automating communications, and detecting variances, ultimately leading to significant time and cost savings.
This Finance program represents Microsoft’s latest endeavor in integrating generative AI, following the introduction of Microsoft 365 Copilot for productivity suites and Dynamics 365 Copilot for enterprise resource planning functions. The Finance Copilot seamlessly integrates with Microsoft 365’s productivity apps, enhancing its functionality.
While Microsoft has not disclosed the pricing details for Copilot for Finance yet, they have indicated that the information will be shared closer to the General Availability (GA) release later this year. To explore a demo of Copilot for Finance or sign up for the public preview, interested parties can visit Microsoft’s official website.
