What is the role of a finance function in an organization in this day and age of AI? Its primary goal is to provide clarity about the organization's finances, and in this case, the most important parameter is time-to-value. Finance functions used to be more backwards-looking reporting-based, explaining what has happened in the past.
But today, the finance function has moved to become more forward-looking opportunity-enabling business partners that enable the organization to chase new goals or eliminate risk. However, this can only be done if the finance function or department has a real-time view of the company's finances. They need complete transparency and clarity to bring these numbers and opportunities to the organization. This requires a well-oiled task-switching machine for a finance function to work that way, so we need to ask ourselves, as users in a finance function, if we are spending our time well.
What we do know is that users do a lot of task-switching. We use so many applications in our daily lives that we toggle between applications and switch contexts, and that's taxing for our minds. There has been some interesting research published by the Harvard Business Review that indicates that switching applications so much actually consumes about 4 hours per week on average. That is the time when we switch between applications and reorient ourselves when we come back to the task where we lose focus because we had to move and switch our focus to this other application. This happens so much during the day that we waste a lot of time if we project this over a longer period of time. What we will see is that those 4 hours actually become 5 weeks per year, and that's about 9% of the annual work time that we spend switching tasks and reorienting ourselves after we lose focus and come back to what we were actually doing.
What if there was a way to stay in the zone and stay in the flow of work?
There is a way, and it's called Copilot for Finance. Currently in preview, this is a new product in the Microsoft 365 suite of applications that lives among the role-based agents for work alongside Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service. It's a game changer for finance professionals who work with Dynamics 365 Business Central by empowering them to streamline their operations and stay in the zone of work. It brings data from other applications surfacing to them so they can take the best decisions at that point in time.
What's great about Copilot for Finance?
Natively integrated with Dynamics 365 Business Central, currently in Outlook. As a collections manager or a collections team collecting funds from your customers who have outstanding balances, you will now have a new companion or sidecar in Outlook that will help summarize an email thread you have a customer. It will surface customer information and allow you to update data back into Business Central. The great thing about here is that you would typically switch between Outlook and Business Central to find the right information to answer this customer or figure out payment status or invoice status and so on. Now, you can do all of this within Outlook and stay in the zone without having to leave your favourite application when it comes to communicating with customers.
Semi-integration with Microsoft Excel. As you may already know, Business Central is already integrated with Excel. With the open and edit Excel features, the Copilot for Finance for Excel allows you to reconcile datasets and soon, perform variance analysis as well. For now, it is a great companion for the edit and open in Excel features in Business Central.
Empower people in Accounts Receivable. Part of the roadmap for Copilot for Finance is the ability to manage accounts receivables from within Microsoft Teams. The integration through Teams will work with the same ERP data as the current Outlook integration. You can read the release plan for Copilot for Finance here.
Extensibility options. If you have custom fields or entities in Business Central, you can surface those in Copilot for Finance in the experiences, for example, in Outlook, where you'll be using Copilot Studio to do that authoring. For example, if you have an API on your customers and you want to expose more fields, invoices, or letter entries, you can surface those as well, in this case, Outlook.
If you want to learn more about Copilot for Finance and what it empowers finance professionals to do, especially with Business Central, or to sign up for a preview, visit this page.
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