Our top picks: The most useful Copilot features in Business Central
Image courtesy of Microsoft.
By now we’ve all seen the Copilot icon popping up in our Microsoft business applications or Edge browser windows. The logo is a flowy little loop design – sometimes monochromatic and sometimes rainbow, depending on where you’re looking. Indeed, Microsoft is enthusiastically adding Copilot features to their Dynamics 365 suite of apps, including Business Central, Sales, and Customer Insights-Journeys. These features are also auto-enabled, which is another reason you see them in your environment.
Business Central has included the occasional AI feature here and there for a while now, but recently, with Microsoft’s 2024 Release Wave 1, more and more are being added. Though all these features prove useful for various needs, there are five features we believe are most valuable to our clients and the broader Business Central user base.
Let’s go over each so you can decide which to try out.
What is Copilot?
For the uninitiated, Copilot is Microsoft’s artificial intelligence assistant they are developing throughout their technology offerings. It’s made to boost productivity, remove tedious manual tasks from your to-do list, and help get your creative juices flowing. The way this AI tool tends to function is by analyzing, summarizing, and synthesizing information you already have within your systems to serve a distinct purpose you’ve identified—like help you match bank reconciliation lines, parse through data to create a distinct list view, and even answer nuanced system inquiries.
A small reminder here though: since Copilot is new, and all these features coming out are also new, you may see some bugs that need fixing. Luckily, Microsoft is investing a lot of time into Copilot’s development, so those bug fixes are likely close at hand.
Feature 1: Chat with Copilot
We’ll start out this list on a strong note by highlighting the Chat feature available on most pages. This works a lot like a little assistant that knows all about Business Central. In the top left of the page you’ll see the Copilot loopy logo, and clicking that will pop open a chat box on the right of the screen.
You will see a prompt guide in the top of the panel, which demonstrates the sort of questions Copilot can recognize. So, for example, you can ask Copilot to find something, explain something, or even explain a process. From here you’ve got open season to ask any question about BC that you want using the text box at the bottom of the panel. Copilot will sift through a heap of Microsoft Documentation to populate results for your inquiry.
Example of Chat with Copilot using the question, “Does Business Central support printing to local Computers?”
It's not all that different than an internet search, except it’s in-app and uses Microsoft Documentation to populate the most appropriate answer without you having to sift through a bunch of results (some of which won’t be relevant or accurate). Overall, it’s a more efficient, less distracting way to find your answers.
Feature 2: Ask Copilot for help with fields
Our next feature uses the Chat function to auto-generate inquiries when you need to understand the purpose of a field in Business Central. Microsoft has put a lot of effort into creating useful, in-depth tooltips to explain each field in the system, but not all tooltips include enough detail for new users or users new to a field.
But this Copilot feature allows you to open a tooltip, determine if you need more information, and then simply click the Copilot icon in the bottom corner of the tip. That will open the Chat with a fully formed inquiry, which Copilot will already be contemplating. Then you’ll see a more detailed response pulled straight from Microsoft documentation explaining the field in further detail.
An example of the “Ask Copilot for help with fields” feature, using the example tooltip for "Your Reference" field on a Sales Order.
Feature 3: “Analyze List” button creates Analysis Views for you
Analysis mode is a relatively new and exceptionally useful built-in analytics feature in Business Central. It allows you to create pivot table-like views of your data right within the BC window without changing the data itself and without needing to use other reporting solutions. For those people who are used to creating pivot tables in Excel, Analysis mode is intuitive and relatively easy to begin using. But if you’re not well-versed in pivot tables, you may have trouble getting started.
So this next Copilot feature takes Analysis mode to the next level by helping you create these views. All you do is click the “Analyze list” button, which will open a dialog box, where you will type a natural language prompt explaining what you want to see in a view. Copilot will then sift through table data and fields and populate that view – or as close as it can get. You can then proceed to add details to the view to refine it and save it for future use.
The Analyze List feature being used to generate a view for "Sales per month based on posting date" on the Posted Sales Invoices List.
The view generated by the Analyze List feature in this demo environment when the prompt was "Sales per month based on posting date" with a prompt window to add details.
Feature 4: Reconcile with Copilot
Bank reconciliation already includes a “Match automatically” tool so that you don’t have to manually trudge through your mountain of transactions and match them one-by-one. “Match automatically” uses logic in code to check invoice numbers and the date to pair up transaction lines and your bank lines. But this is a pretty strict formula that can miss matches that are close but not close enough. It gets us close, but inevitably we are still matching a few lines manually.
“Reconcile with Copilot” uses the ever-learning AI to analyze the description, price, and other factors in a line to catch what the standard algorithm misses. When you use this feature, Copilot first runs the “Match automatically” logic, then runs its own analysis with the remaining lines. We can see much greater match accuracy—it can even pick up on multiple entries applying to one bank statement line!—and save time with our bank recs in future.
Bank reconciliation using the “Reconcile with Copilot” feature.
Plus, if a transaction line doesn’t have an associated bank line – for instance, if you have a bank charge – you can select that line or lines, then use the “Post difference to GL account” action under the Home tab. This is yet another Copilot action that will propose a GL account to post this transaction to, and then allow you to fill in the Journal Template and Journal Batch right in the same window.
The Copilot “Post Difference to G/L Account” action suggests a posting G/L account and for a transaction.
Feature 5: Generate Marketing Text
Finally, the Marketing Text feature takes details we already entered into the item card to create a product description for that item. This is available on the Item Card. Simply click the “Draft with Copilot” button and give it a moment to generate. After the system creates a draft, you can ask it to regenerate a new attempt, revise it manually, or have Copilot alter it in a more specific way—via a specific tone, format, or emphasis that you select. Once you’ve struck the right feeling in the description, you can save that description.
An example of generated marketing text using the Copilot feature for an example “Athen’s Desk” product.
If you are using the Business Central Shopify integration, you can push the description straight to the Shopify store. If you are not using the Shopify integration, then you can copy that description to your other e-commerce site or marketing materials.
Copilot AI is an ever-growing and improving component of your Microsoft business applications. There’s no extra expense to use these new features, and they are automatically available in your environment. So we recommend you try them out to see which Copilot features work well for your needs, and consider how you might add them to your processes.
Plus, you’ll want to keep an eye out for new Copilot features in the coming months and years so you can keep benefiting from this free addition to your Business Central functionality!