Microsoft announced Thursday it’s expanding Copilot for finance with more than 25 new finance skills and partner-built plugins, including new accounting capabilities in Excel and new finance and capital markets plugins for Cowork.
The new capabilities follow the finance skills that Microsoft introduced in Excel in June.
“Excel has long been central to how finance professionals analyze, model, and manage their work. But with Copilot, you don’t have to start in Excel. You can work directly in the Copilot app to manage broader finance workflows, bringing in the full power of Excel whenever you need it,” Brian Jones, corporate vice president of the Excel Product Group at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post on Oct. 29.
He says the new accounting capabilities, available in Frontier for Copilot in Excel and Cowork, help accountants spend less time on repetitive, manual tasks in the places they already work, including:
- Reconcile accounts: Compare balances and transactions, identify discrepancies, and prepare reconciling items for review.
- Prepare journal entries faster: Draft accruals, reclassifications, allocations, reversals, and recurring entries, with checks for required inputs and balanced entries.
- Turn results into clear reporting: Analyze financial performance against plan, identify key drivers, and prepare reporting that explains what changed and why.
Additional capabilities span audit, tax, financial planning and analysis, compliance, and training, he says.
“Accountants are already putting these capabilities to work. In seven days of limited Insiders availability, more than 8,000 unique users invoked accounting skills more than 44,000 times across more than 18,000 Copilot conversations,” Jones wrote. “In Excel, finance professionals will also have the option to start an audit trail whenever they invoke an accounting capability. If selected, this will create a record in their chat history of what Copilot changed and why.”
In addition, new finance and capital markets plugins for Cowork extend Copilot into multi-step workflows across files and conversations, while partner plugins, including Intuit QuickBooks, Xero, Zoho Books, Moody’s, S&P Global, and FactSet, bring more of the finance ecosystem into Copilot.
“Financial work demands more than an answer,” Jones wrote. “Professionals need to examine the sources and assumptions behind the work, trace what changed, and determine which edits belong in the final result.”
He continued: “Copilot is designed to support that review. In Excel, Copilot’s context extends beyond the workbook’s current state to the history of how it evolved. With this context, Copilot can summarize recent activity, identify when specific changes were made and by whom, and explain how they may have affected the analysis. It can also selectively reverse individual edits without disrupting the rest of the workbook, giving professionals greater control over the final result.
“Across experiences, Copilot processes prompts and responses within the Microsoft 365 service boundary with enterprise data protection. It works only with content each user can access, honors existing permissions and sensitivity labels, and does not use prompts, responses, or documents to train the underlying foundation models.
“Copilot helps move the work forward. Finance professionals retain control of the recommendations, decisions, approvals, and actions that follow.”
Photo credit: Angel Bena/Pexels
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Tags: Accounting, Copilot, Excel, Microsoft, Technology
