Try Business Central’s new Copilot feature
Microsoft continues to invest in advancements for its entire stack of business solutions, and new AI features are being added as new technologies are developed. Copilot is the newest AI feature that helps users save time throughout the day. Copilot works across the entire Microsoft business application suite, including Power Platform, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
Dynamics 365 Copilot is specifically configured to use with Dynamics 365 CRM and Dynamics 365 Business Central with plenty of tools that help you cultivate better customer relationships, generate new content ideas, and save time on manual (yet necessary) tasks.
Copilot is your new AI-assistant, taking your previous work and other inputs to generate content for you – from emails and presentations to proposal drafts and beyond. It is the ultimate idea starter to get you going with new material that you can use as-is or edit to fit your needs.
Business Central users can benefit uniquely from Copilot’s content generation by never having to worry about generating item descriptions from scratch again. Let’s check out Copilot within BC, plus some other ways you can leverage the power of AI in the system.
Create new items
Creative roadblocks can slow down the process of writing image descriptions for each and every unique item a business has within its systems, and having dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of items can quickly pile up when it’s time for product managers to enter them into Business Central. Copilot helps you save time by generating unique product descriptions to make your products stand out.
You’ll have the option to create a new item using “New from picture” and upload the image of your item. Copilot’s AI will analyze the picture and suggest the item’s category, as well as attributes like color, material, and size—then you can make manual edits if you want, or leave it as is. After that, with just a single click, you can use Copilot to generate a text description using the data from the item card you just input. The generated text can be tailored to your preferred tone, brand voice, format, and length to keep all your marketing materials consistent while creating unique descriptions for each item.
Once items have been created, Copilot can help you quickly publish new products to your ecommerce site, as well. By syncing to Shopify and other ecommerce platforms, you can manage your offerings, right from within your inventory in Business Central.
Copilot will be an exciting new addition to Business Central and is currently in preview—meaning you can test and play around with it in a sandbox environment until the feature goes live in a future update. In the meantime, there are plenty of other AI-powered tools available in Business Central that will help you save time and promote efficiency across multiple touchpoints.
Inventory management
An extension is available to help you create sales and inventory forecasts, and the extension uses AI to configure the extension and use different reporting periods (like forecasting by month or by quarter) and the number of periods to use when calculating the forecast. Microsoft suggests forecasting by month and with a 12-month horizon—and the more data you provide, the more accurate your predictions will be.
The extension allows AI to use historical data, so future sales are predicted based on your actual sales history. The extension also provides you with inventory replenishment suggestions based on the forecasts, allowing you to keep up with customer demand based on your own historical trends for efficient inventory management. Learn more about Sales and Inventory Forecasting →
Payment predictions
You can enable late payment predictions using another extension in Business Central. When you have better insights into your receivables, it can help you adjust your collection terms with certain customers as needed—things like accepted payment method, net payment terms, requiring up-front payment, etc.
The Late Payment Prediction extension can be enabled and adds the tile to the Business Manager Role Center, allowing you to view real-time numbers in a dashboard tile. You can view payment predictions for specific sales orders, invoices, and quotas in the tile, and pulling up the Customer Ledger Entries page lets you see whether the payment for an invoice is predicted to be late and the prediction’s confidence rate. Predictions are made using a data model, and the model pulls from the following:
For Customer ledger entries with related Posted Sales Invoices—
Amount (LCY) including Tax
Payment terms in days calculated as Due Date minus Posting date
Whether or not there is an applied credit memo
With additional data from a customer’s other invoices:
Total number and amount of paid invoices
Total number and amount of invoices that were paid late
Total number and amount of outstanding invoices
Total number and amount of outstanding invoices that are already late
Average days late
Ratio: Number Paid Late/Paid invoices
Ratio: Amount Paid Late/Paid invoices
Ratio: Number Outstanding Late/Outstanding invoices
Ratio: Amount Outstanding Late/Outstanding invoices
Cash Flow Analysis
Creating a Cash Flow Analysis gives you a better look at your company financials and helps you keep track of the cash coming in and out. A Role Center configured to serve accountants will come preconfigured with several charts—Cash Cycle, Income & Expenses, Cash Flow, and Cash Flow Forecasts. The Cash Cycle and Income & Expense charts pull data from your Chart of Accounts and other financial reports, and the charts are able to calculate values based on your sales, receivables, payables, etc.
AI insights can be used to improve your Cash Flow oversight and help you better understand how things are likely to pan out. AI can also be used for Cash Flow Setup, with Azure AI providing assisted guides for easy setup. Once it’s been set up, the chart will be shown on your user homepage.
Dynamics 365 Copilot is currently in preview, meaning you can adopt it early and use it in your sandbox environment. That way you get its full benefit when it’s available for live production use. To plan for future features and releases, you can use the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform Release Planner.
Curious about a few of the features you’re seeing? Get in touch with us, and our consulting team will let you know if it’s a good fit for your processes and business needs.