AI in Financial Reporting

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It has been a while since I posted, but I have been getting a lot of questions lately from clients and from my accounting students about the same topic:  Where does AI actually belong in the financial reporting process?  Everyone wants to know if they should be using it, and the honest answer is that it depends a lot on which part of the process you are talking about. I have been working with several clients on this over the last few months, plus I have an upcoming speaking session on AI in reporting, so I thought I would put some of these thoughts together here. For each point, I am also going to push back on myself a little, because I think that is a more useful way to think through this than just picking a side. Where AI is actually helping right now The clearest win I have seen is variance analysis. AI tools are good at scanning through a large number of GL lines and flagging the ones that look different from what history would predict. Think of a vendor payment that...
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Copilot Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply

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Microsoft has recently released two Copilot applications to work with Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain. These solutions are still in preview, so it should only be uses in sandbox environments to evaluate and learn how they will work with your organization.

Prior to installing it is important to make sure your environment meets the requirements. Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain requires the latest hotfix on Dynamics 365 Finance version 10.0.34 (10.0.1591.107) and version 10.0.35 (10.0.1627.70) and later. In addition, the solutions rely on the Power Platform and Dataverse, so it is important to have the environments connected and user security set appropriately.

For more details on the prerequisites and the installation instructions you can follow the Microsoft installation documents.

Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance

Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain

Let's look at what these two copilots provide to users

Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance

Collection coordinator summary

Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance works with the Credit and Collections module through a new workspace titled Collections coordinator summary.

The new workspace provides a new view into a customer's balance and activity. There is also a tab to quickly see all the open transactions. With Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance installed, AI will automatically generate a summary analysis of the open activity with the customer, and by clicking on the create reminder button, the system will automatically create an email. You will be able to edit the email prior to sending.

Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain

Confirmed purchase order with changes

Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain works with the Purchase and Procurement module through a new workspace, Confirmed purchase order with changes.



The new workspace is used to analyze any purchase orders that have a change to the quantity or the delivery date.  The workspace categorizes the changes as low impact or high impact.  Low impact changes are for purchase orders that have not been pegged to sales or production orders.  High impact changes are for purchase orders that have been pegged to a sales or production order.

Copilot provides a summary generated by AI of the changes in each category, so the user can get a quick overview of the detailed shown in the data.  This summary includes information on how many orders and lines have changed along with information on the items that have changed.


In addition, the workspace will also show any impacted downstream orders, including sales orders and production orders. 


From the workspace, if you are not willing to accept the changes, it is possible to start communication with the vendor through either Team or Email.  If the changes are acceptable, the user can quickly confirm the changed purchase orders.

Summary

As you can see with these two copilot solutions from Microsoft, that AI is starting to become part of the daily operations of the finance and operations teams.  These solutions are still in preview, so there might be more features coming before they are generally available, and I am sure with the current investments from Microsoft that we can expect more AI solutions in the new future.

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