A month-end workbook arrives with hundreds of rows. Finance needs to find unusual movements, explain the larger variances and prepare a short update for management.
That is a sensible place to use Copilot.
It is less sensible to ask an AI tool to decide whether the accounts are correct.
For finance teams, the distinction matters. Copilot can help with analysis, drafting and repetitive work, but the accountant still needs to verify the source data, calculations and accounting treatment.
Here is how we suggest finance teams start.
Start with work that already has a clear source
Copilot works best when the task begins with information you can inspect.
For example, a management accountant may have an Excel workbook containing monthly actuals and budget figures. Instead of manually reviewing every line, the accountant can ask Copilot to identify the largest movements and help investigate them.
A useful prompt would be specific:
"Compare actual and budget by expense category. Identify the five largest absolute variances and show the figures used for each calculation."
That is better than asking, "What is wrong with this budget?"
The first request defines the calculation and asks for evidence. The second asks Copilot to make a judgement without enough context.
Use Copilot in Excel for first-pass analysis
Excel is an obvious starting point because finance teams already spend significant time there.
Copilot in Excel can help with tasks such as generating formulas, analysing structured data, creating PivotTables and charts, and explaining patterns in a workbook.
Consider an accounts receivable export containing customer, invoice date, due date, invoice amount and outstanding balance.
Finance could ask Copilot to:
group outstanding balances by customer;
identify the largest overdue amounts;
compare overdue balances between periods;
create a formula for an ageing calculation;
highlight unusual movements; and
prepare a short explanation of the findings.
The accountant should then inspect the underlying rows.
This checking step cannot be skipped. An apparently sensible summary can still be misleading if the workbook contains duplicate transactions, inconsistent dates, incomplete records or incorrectly structured data.
Copilot does not repair weak financial controls.
Ask for calculations you can trace
Finance prompts should make checking easier.
Suppose a Lagos distributor has monthly operating expenses in naira. Management wants to understand why September spending increased.
Instead of asking Copilot to "analyse expenses", give it a defined task:
"Compare September expenses with August by general ledger category. Show the amount and percentage movement for each category. Sort from the largest naira increase to the smallest."
You can then ask a second question:
For the three largest increases, identify the rows contributing most to each movement.
This sequence gives the accountant something concrete to inspect.
The same principle applies to margin analysis, cash collections, supplier spending and departmental budgets. Start with a defined calculation, then move towards interpretation.
Use Copilot to explain figures, not approve them
One useful finance task happens after the analysis.
The numbers may be correct, but somebody still has to explain them to a manager who does not want to inspect a 20-sheet workbook.
Copilot can help turn checked analysis into plain language.
For example:
"Write a five-point management summary of these results. State the actual and budget figures behind each significant variance. Do not suggest causes unless the workbook contains evidence for them."
That last sentence matters.
If electricity costs rose, the spreadsheet may show the increase but not the reason. Finance should not allow a generated explanation to turn an assumption into a fact.
The accountant can add the business context afterwards.
Use Outlook for routine finance communication
A large amount of finance work is communication rather than calculation.
Customers need statements. Suppliers ask about payments. Managers ask whether invoices have been approved. Finance staff repeatedly write similar messages while checking different records.
Copilot can help draft these communications.
An accounts receivable employee, for example, can prepare a customer follow-up based on an approved statement or invoice information. The employee should still confirm the customer, invoice numbers, amounts and payment status before sending anything.
This becomes particularly useful when an email thread is long. A summary can help the employee identify what has already been agreed and what still needs action.
The final financial position should come from the accounting system, not from somebody's recollection of an email thread.
Use Teams to reduce meeting administration
Finance meetings create another small but persistent workload.
A month-end meeting may cover missing accruals, outstanding reconciliations, customer collections, supplier issues and reports that still need approval.
Where your Microsoft 365 setup and meeting policies permit the relevant Copilot features, it can help users work with meeting discussions and prepare follow-up information.
The useful output is not simply a meeting summary.
Finance needs actions.
A finance manager should be able to leave a meeting with a clear record of who needs to investigate a balance, which reconciliation remains outstanding and what must happen before reporting is completed.
As with any generated summary, someone should check important actions against what was actually agreed.
Keep Business Central as the accounting record
Companies using Dynamics 365 Business Central should be clear about the role of each tool.
Business Central holds accounting and operational transactions. That can include general ledger entries, customer and vendor transactions, sales and purchasing documents, bank information and inventory records, depending on how the system is configured.
Copilot can assist people working with information, but it should not become a second accounting record.
Define the authoritative source for each finance process before introducing Copilot.
Review permissions before wider use
There is another issue that finance and IT should handle together: access.
Copilot works with information a user is permitted to access in Microsoft 365. That makes existing permissions particularly important.
A badly shared folder was already a problem before Copilot. AI can make that problem easier to notice because users can ask questions across information available to them.
Before a broad rollout, review access to finance SharePoint sites, Teams, shared files and sensitive folders.
Payroll files, board papers, banking information and confidential forecasts deserve particular attention.
Do not treat Copilot deployment as a substitute for fixing permissions.
Give finance a checking rule
A simple internal rule can prevent many problems:
Copilot can prepare the work. The responsible employee checks the financial result.
For calculations, check formulas and source rows.
For summaries, compare statements with the underlying report.
For emails, verify names, dates, amounts and commitments before sending.
For accounting treatment, follow the company's approved policies and professional judgement rather than accepting generated text as authority.
For tax matters, verify the treatment against current requirements from FIRS and other relevant authorities. Tax requirements can change, so an AI response should not be treated as the current rule without confirmation.
Run a small finance pilot first
Buying access for a finance department is not the same as getting useful adoption.
Choose two or three recurring tasks.
Month-end variance analysis is one candidate. Receivables follow-up is another. Preparing management commentary from an already checked report can also work.
For each task, write down the current process and identify where time is being spent.
Then define what Copilot is allowed to do, what the employee must verify and what information should never be accepted without checking the original source.
Run the process with a small group before expanding it.
We often find that the prompt itself is only part of the work. File organisation, permissions, spreadsheet structure and clear responsibilities determine whether the result is useful.
Build a small finance prompt library
Once the team finds prompts that work, save the good ones.
A finance prompt library might contain approved starting prompts for variance analysis, receivables review, meeting actions and management commentary.
Keep them specific. Include the required output, the period being analysed and the checks the employee should perform.
This also makes training easier when another accountant joins the team. Staff do not have to invent a new approach every time they open Copilot.
The practical next step is to choose one recurring Excel task that currently takes finance significant manual review. Use Copilot for the first pass, document the checks an accountant must perform, and compare the process with the way the team handles the same task now.
