How Copilot in Business Central Helps Finance Teams Work Smarter

The promise of AI has remained elusive for many finance professionals. To ensure adherence to regulatory and audit requirements, many finance teams have been slow to integrate AI capabilities into their daily workflow.

Reluctant to use AI in your finance team? Copilot in Business Central can help your finance team do more, faster, and with fewer errors.

How users are leveraging Copilot in Business Central right now

Suggesting transactions and automating postings

Finance teams spend significant time entering, matching, and classifying transactions. Copilot in Business Central helps lighten that load by suggesting entries or account codes during reconciliation or posting tasks.

For example, instead of laboriously comparing line items when reconciling bank statements, Copilot can propose which general ledger accounts to use for adjustments or unmatched items. Users can then approve or tweak those suggestions rather than building them from scratch.

Similarly, when creating sales or purchase documents, Copilot can suggest line items or fill in default values based on past behavior, such as suggesting items a customer often orders.

Forecasting cash flow and liquidity

One of the more strategic uses of Copilot is for financial forecasting and planning, particularly concerning cash flow.

Using historical transaction data, account balances, payables due, receivables, and known commitments, Copilot can generate a forward-looking view of your liquidity. This allows your finance team to ask Copilot, “What is our projected cash position in 30, 60, 90 days?” and get charts, scenarios, and commentary.

Beyond raw forecasts, Copilot can flag late payment risk. For example, use Copilot to assess which customer invoices are likely to become overdue. You can even ask it to provide confidence levels, such as high, medium, or low, so your team can take preventive action.

Copilot can also run “what-if” scenarios, such as assessing the impact of accelerating receivables on your cash position. Such simulations can help company leadership make more informed decisions.

Supporting analytics, reporting, and insights

Beyond automating tasks, Copilot can also generate analytics and insights. Rather than having your analysts write queries, slicers, or pivot tables, finance staff can interact with data via natural language, asking questions like “Show me top expense categories this quarter vs. the same quarter last year” or “Which customers have the largest average days sales outstanding?” Copilot can help generate charts, analysis mode views, or reports in response.

Assist with the month-end or year-end close

Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central can be a powerful assistant for the month-end or year-end closing process.

Copilot can streamline routine steps that often consume valuable time by suggesting journal entries, assist in reconciling accounts by identifying anomalies or inconsistencies, match transactions more efficiently, and flag any discrepancies, ensuring compliance and audit readiness.

Adding Copilot for Finance for even greater efficiency

Copilot for Finance gives you AI-powered help when you work in Microsoft 365 applications while accessing ERP data from Business Central in real-time, removing the need to juggle tasks and making financial processes more streamlined and automated.

For example, with Copilot for Finance integrated into Outlook, your AR or collections staff can compose emails to customers without leaving their email client. Copilot can pull in relevant customer data from Business Central (outstanding invoices, aging, customer contact info), propose subject lines or email body text, and even attach the relevant invoices automatically.

Using Copilot for Finance and Copilot in Business Central Together

While Copilot in Business Central and Copilot for Finance can operate independently, their real power emerges when they’re used together as part of an integrated finance ecosystem. Each Copilot focuses on a different layer of the finance workflow—one inside the ERP and one at the communication and collaboration layer.

Copilot in Business Center is embedded in Business Central and helps users with tasks, insights, and actions performed directly in Business Central.

On the other hand, Copilot for Finance serves as an AI agent that works in conjunction with Microsoft 365 tools, including Outlook and Teams, and integrates with Business Central, offering real-time access to ERP data.

For tasks entirely within the ERP, such as preparing financial reports, analyzing budgets, interacting with general ledgers, and workflows within Business Central, Copilot in Business Central is seamless and is best suited for users whose primary workflow is within Business Central.

For roles heavily tied to communications, such as collections, AR follow-up, or customer correspondence, or for users working predominantly in Outlook and Teams, Copilot for Finance reduces friction by bringing ERP data into email and allowing users to act without jumping between tools.

In many organizations, you can deploy both. Use Copilot in Business Central to handle the in-ERP tasks and analysis, and use Copilot for Finance to empower AR/collections workflows. Together, they link strategic insight with front-line execution.

Considerations, limitations, and best practices

It is important to recognize that Copilot (or any AI application, for that matter) is merely a tool, not a substitute for human interaction. Keep the following in mind as you introduce Copilot into your Finance organization:

• Copilot’s suggestions are not infallible. AI tools typically provide their best estimates based on the available data. Human review and oversight are crucial, especially for disputes or sensitive accounts.
• Permissions must be well managed. Because Copilot can write back to the ERP, you must be deliberate about who gets access to full update rights vs. read-only privileges. Misconfigured permissions could lead to costly mistakes and unintended edits.
• Be aware of data privacy, compliance, and regional limits. The geography of where your data resides relative to Azure OpenAI services matters. When using Copilot in Business Central, data remains within the Business Central environment, subject to Microsoft’s governance, with administrators controlling whether cross-geography data movement is permitted. With Copilot for Finance, data passed into the Outlook/agent context must also respect governance, especially in regulated industries or data sovereignty environments. If your regulatory environment disallows cross-border data movement, you’ll need to configure Copilot carefully.
• Expect a learning curve. Your finance team will need training to learn how to optimize their Copilot prompts, validate suggestions, and correct or override when needed.
• Understand costs and licensing. Copilot in Business Central is part of the Business Central environment. Copilot for Finance is a separate product and might require additional licensing.

Get started with Copilot in Business Central

By offloading repetitive tasks (such as drafting communications, matching transactions, and forecasting), Copilot frees up your finance staff to focus on exceptions, analysis, strategic decisions, and value creation.

For finance leadership, this means:

• Faster cycle times (closing, collections, reporting)
• Improved consistency and reduced errors
• Better proactive visibility into cash and financial risks
• Stronger alignment between data and narrative (turning numbers into a story)
• Capability to scale without proportionally scaling headcount

Contact ArcherPoint by Cherry Bekaert to learn how to integrate Copilot into your Business Central workflow.

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