Copilot in Business Central: what it does and where it helps

There’s plenty of debate about AI in ERP right now. In our recent Exploring Copilots webinar, we cut through the speculation about what Copilot might do one day and showed what it’s already doing in Business Central today.

Copilot makes everyday processes noticeably smoother

The clearest way to understand Copilot’s value is to look at the moments where your ERP processes traditionally struggle and see how Copilot helps smooth them out.

Take purchase invoice matching. In theory it’s simple: Business Central matches invoices to purchase orders on expected values and descriptions. In reality, suppliers use different names, descriptions vary, and small price differences crop up constantly. As a result, finance teams lose hours reconciling the gaps by hand.

This is exactly where Copilot shines. It reads through those inconsistencies the way an experienced person would: interpreting different descriptions, recognising likely matches, and proposing how transactions line up even when the data isn’t a perfect fit. When something genuinely falls outside your thresholds, it surfaces the discrepancy clearly rather than pushing it through. The result is a faster process with far fewer exceptions and a lot less manual chasing.

Copilot features in Business Central

To understand the practical value of Copilot, it helps to look at the features available in Business Central today, all of which included in the standard BC licence. Broadly, they fall into three areas: productivity, operations, and accounting.

Productivity — faster answers, less hunting

• Summarise: a short, plain-English summary appears automatically on any record, card, or document, with links straight back to the source fields. You can copy the summary and a deep link into Teams in one click, and it tailors itself to your role.
• Chat with Copilot: find and surface records in natural language, and get help with processes drawn from Microsoft’s own documentation. Switch on web search and it can even read your linked knowledge bases. For our customers, that means querying the Bevica knowledge base directly, with sources cited.
• Advanced Tell Me: search by what you mean, not the exact menu wording. Ask for “people we buy stuff from” and it finds vendors; it even understands abbreviations like UOM for unit of measure.
• Analyse with Copilot: build analysis views and pivots just by describing what you want to see, then refine them conversationally. No manual setup is required.

Operations - the real time-savers

• Suggest sales lines: create sales lines from a typed description, a pasted customer email, or an uploaded CSV. It can even reference past documents - “reorder the drinks we invoiced in January” - and pull the right items through.
• Item substitutions: when stock runs low, Copilot suggests sensible alternatives from your catalogue, each with a confidence score.
• Marketing text: draft polished product descriptions from your item attributes, adjust the tone, and push them straight to Shopify, now syncing in both directions.
• Number series & autofill: spin up new number series during setup in seconds and let Copilot suggest field values across a whole fast tab — always as suggestions you review and approve.

Accounting - where it really has superpowers

• Bank reconciliation: after the standard auto-match, Copilot tackles the tricky cases:  fuzzy descriptions and one-to-many matches where a single deposit covers several invoices. It can post small differences to the right GL account and remembers the mapping for next time.
• E-document & purchase invoice matching: Copilot semantically matches incoming invoice lines to your purchase order lines, complete with confidence scores, and learns how each supplier names its products so future matches run faster and more reliably,  all within your price-tolerance settings.
  
  

Copilot works with Business Central, making it stronger

A common assumption is that Copilot replaces the way Business Central normally works. It doesn’t and that’s good news. It works hand-in-hand with your existing rules: your matching parameters, tolerances, and document structures stay firmly in place. Copilot adds intelligence on top to handle the messy, real-world variation those rules were never designed to absorb.

That’s a powerful combination. You keep full control, and Business Central gains the flexibility to deal confidently with the data it sees every day. Better still, it compounds as your team confirms matches, the system handles similar transactions more consistently over time.

Copilot supports your Business Central set-up

Copilot rewards well-designed processes. That means the configuration work you’ve already invested in pays off twice.

Features like invoice matching draw directly on how your environment is set up: your price tolerances, matching rules, and exception controls all shape the quality of Copilot’s suggestions. The clearer those foundations, and the cleaner your data, the sharper and more reliable the results. In other words, you decide where flexibility makes sense and where tighter control is needed. Copilot then supports those decisions rather than working around them.

Is Copilot in Business Central secure?

For finance and IT teams, the practical safeguards matter just as much as the functionality. Copilot respects each user’s permissions, so it won’t surface data someone isn’t authorised to see. Your business data isn’t used to train the underlying models. And if your Business Central environment sits within the EU or UK data boundary, the AI service remains within that same boundary too. The standard Copilot features are included in your licence. So you can start using them straight away.

What’s next for Copilot in Business Central?

Finance is a brilliant starting point, but it’s only the beginning. Microsoft is already extending Copilot into areas like sustainability: suggesting CO₂ emissions for your sustainability journals and richer product information, with generated dimensions, variants, and units of measure on the horizon, plus support for more languages. The roadmap is rich, and it’s moving quickly.

The bottom line

Copilot is at its best when it’s grounded in well-defined processes. Its strength isn’t in replacing how your system works. It’s in making that system dramatically better at handling the inconsistencies and gaps that show up day to day, cutting the effort of interpreting data and supporting sharper decisions right inside your workflows.

For businesses already on Business Central, that’s a real opportunity to make existing processes more effective, consistent, and manageable, often with no change to how your team works.

And if you’re not yet on Business Central, there’s never been a better moment to put strong foundations in place and get value from AI from day one. With connected data and joined-up processes, tools like Copilot help you make faster decisions, cut manual work, and scale with confidence.

Let’s talk about Copilot and Business Central

We’d love to have a straightforward conversation about where AI makes the biggest difference for your business and what a sensible first step looks like.

Talk to our team about AI in Business Central