Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing how finance teams access information, analyze financial data, and complete everyday accounting tasks. Microsoft 365 Copilot brings AI directly into Outlook, Teams, Excel, Word, and other Microsoft applications. When paired with modern accounting software, finance professionals can securely retrieve accounting information without constantly switching between applications.
What is Microsoft 365 Copilot?
Microsoft 365 Copilot is an AI-powered assistant that helps users work more efficiently across familiar Microsoft applications, including Outlook, Teams, Excel, Word, and Power BI. It uses natural language to answer questions, summarize information, analyze data, automate routine tasks, and help users find the information they need faster.
For finance teams, Microsoft 365 Copilot can simplify everyday accounting tasks by securely retrieving financial information, generating reports, identifying trends, and providing insights using existing business data. When paired with Gravity Software, Copilot can securely surface accounting information within the tools finance teams already use while respecting existing user permissions. This allows finance professionals to spend less time searching for information and more time analyzing results, making decisions, and supporting business growth.
Streamline mundane tasks and boost team morale
Finance teams spend a significant portion of their day on routine administrative work before they can focus on financial analysis and strategic decision-making.
Finance teams spend a significant portion of their day on repetitive administrative tasks, such as searching for information, reviewing emails, summarizing documents, and preparing reports. While these activities are necessary, they reduce the time available for financial analysis, strategic planning, and decision-making.
Microsoft 365 Copilot helps reduce that administrative workload by generating content, summarizing information, extracting key details from emails and documents, and helping users quickly find the accounting information they need. By automating routine tasks, finance professionals can focus more time on higher-value work that supports business growth.
What are some specific ways finance leaders can use Microsoft 365 Copilot to spend less time on routine tasks and more time delivering strategic value?
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Stuck on an introduction that sufficiently sums up your enterprise's annual report? Copilot can help brainstorm ideas, making your final draft that much more engaging and polished.
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Struggling to remember the relevant information from a series of emails between the finance department and the CEO about which data points should be included in the quarterly reports? AI can pull the significant takeaways from those emails, saving your team from having to cull through dozens of messages.
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Have a question about an invoice or purchase order stored in OneDrive? Find the answer without ever opening a file.
Enhance client and colleague interactions with AI assistance
Every profession requires a level of interpersonal interaction, but for finance professionals, crafting emails and responding to chats is yet another task that can distract from their primary responsibilities. Yet failing to respond to inquiries, or providing terse replies, is a good way to alienate clients, colleagues, and company leadership.
Microsoft 365 Copilot can also help finance teams work more efficiently while responding to emails. For example, while reviewing a vendor approval email, users can quickly retrieve outstanding balances, payment history, or overdue invoices without leaving Outlook. It can also help draft email reminders, such as following up with employees who haven't submitted mileage or expense reports.
AI can also help you adapt your communication style to fit any scenario.
For finance teams, Microsoft 365 Copilot can help draft responses to vendors, summarize email conversations about invoices or approvals, and adjust the tone of communications with customers, auditors, or company leadership. This allows finance professionals to communicate more effectively while spending less time on routine administrative tasks.
Manage information overload with advanced AI capabilities
For finance leaders, clarity in communication is crucial. A large-language model AI tool like ChatGPT or Microsoft 365 Copilot can distill complex financial data into formats stakeholders can easily understand.
Finance leaders interact with a variety of stakeholders. Copilot can help you provide more relevant financial reporting to people who need it, whether it's your executive team, investors, board members, or family members within a family office who have little knowledge of investment portfolios, depreciation, and appreciation of physical assets. Copilot can also help transform financial information into clear, engaging presentations for leadership meetings, board reviews, or investor updates.
As a finance leader, you can also use Microsoft 365 Copilot to summarize meeting notes, organize action items, condense lengthy reports, and prepare for executive meetings more efficiently. These capabilities help finance teams stay informed while reducing the time spent reviewing large volumes of information.
Use advanced analytics and forecasting in Excel with Copilot
For finance professionals who rely on Excel, Microsoft 365 Copilot simplifies data analysis by allowing users to ask questions using natural language instead of building complex formulas or queries.
One of the most beneficial features of Copilot in Excel is that users can analyze, summarize and search for data using plain language rather than having to input complicated parameters or formulas. For instance, you can say something like, “make all cells red where the value is under 1000,” to highlight a certain data set. Copilot offers the ability to use Python in Excel for more advanced analytics, including the ability to translate results into easy-to-understand visualizations.
Ask accounting questions using natural language
Microsoft 365 Copilot allows finance professionals to search accounting data using everyday language instead of building reports or complex queries. For example, users can ask Copilot to:
- Show invoices over 60 days old.
- Display accounts payable balances over a specified amount.
- List customers with the highest outstanding balances.
- Visualize invoice history.
- Retrieve accounts receivable or accounts payable aging information.
- Analyze financial trends and summarize key results.
Natural language queries make accounting information easier to access, helping finance teams find answers faster and spend more time analyzing results instead of searching for data.
Copilot in Excel can also help with financial analysis and planning. Organizations can analyze the potential impact of acquisitions, new legal entities, changing operating costs, or other business scenarios. By quickly analyzing data and identifying trends, Microsoft Copilot helps finance professionals make faster, more informed decisions.
Simplify workflow automation with Copilot
Microsoft Power Automate already makes it easy to create workflows that boost productivity. But reaping these benefits requires an upfront investment of time and effort to map out and design each step of the desired workflow.
With Copilot, the task of automating workflows in Power Automate becomes much simpler. As you begin to describe your automation scenario, you'll see a list of AI-generated suggested flow descriptions. You can accept these recommendations or add, subtract or modify the steps to create the workflow that best supports your organization.
Navigating AI technology with caution
One of the most common questions surrounding the increasing prevalence of AI in the workplace is whether it will make employees obsolete. While AI can provide an excellent starting point for a project, users must still fact-check and review content before sending it out into the world or using it to drive decision-making.
Microsoft itself warns users that the purpose of Copilot is to work alongside human users, not in place of them.
"Copilot is not autopilot," the company states on its website.
Another consideration when using AI tools is security. To create an email that sounds like you or to condense a cache of notes you've taken into a one-page summary, AI technology must access your email, your notes and your documents. That’s why it’s imperative to work with AI providers you can trust. There are many AI tools available today, but not all of them are committed to protecting users' data.
Fortunately, if you're using Microsoft Copilot or any other Microsoft technology, your data is protected by Microsoft's robust security practices and commitment to rolling out AI technology in a responsible way.
Gravity Software and Microsoft 365 Copilot
Microsoft 365 Copilot helps finance teams securely access accounting information, automate routine tasks, and work more efficiently. Because Gravity Software is built natively on the Microsoft Power Platform, organizations can use Microsoft Copilot across Outlook, Teams, Excel, Word, and other Microsoft applications while securely accessing accounting information from Gravity Software.
Unlike solutions that simply add AI to selected features, Gravity Software enables organizations to use Microsoft 365 Copilot while maintaining enterprise-grade security and existing role-based permissions.
Finance professionals can retrieve accounting information from Gravity Software without leaving the applications they use every day, reducing context switching and helping teams make faster, more informed decisions.
Gravity Software extends Microsoft 365 Copilot with capabilities such as:
- Microsoft Power BI for real-time dashboards and business intelligence.
- Power Automate, Power Apps, and Microsoft Copilot to automate workflows and improve productivity.
- Secure access to accounting information where finance teams already work.
- Role-based security and Microsoft-managed enterprise security.
- Continuous innovation through Microsoft's ongoing investment in the Power Platform.
Gravity Software also includes AI-powered AP automation, using Microsoft AI services to read vendor invoices, extract key information, and automatically create vouchers, reducing manual data entry and improving accounts payable efficiency.
Ready to see Microsoft 365 Copilot and Gravity Software in action? Schedule a personalized demo to see how finance teams use AI to automate accounting processes, access financial information faster, and improve productivity.
Gravity Software
Better. Smarter. Accounting.
Updated on August 3, 2026