Finance is one of the most demanding places for AI to deliver value. General-purpose AI can help, but finance requires AI that understands the work for each role, draws upon the business context behind it, and supports professional review and judgment.
In June 2026, we introduced finance skills in Copilot in Excel. Today, we’re expanding with more than 25 new finance skills and partner-built plugins across Microsoft Copilot, purpose-built for accounting, capital markets, and broader finance work.
Excel has long been central to how finance professionals analyze, model, and manage their work. But with Copilot, you don’t have to start in Excel. You can work directly in the Copilot app to manage broader finance workflows, bringing in the full power of Excel whenever you need it.
With Office in Copilot, Excel is embedded directly into the Copilot app, so you can analyze, edit, and co-author workbooks without leaving Chat or Cowork, with the familiar capabilities and controls you rely on. In Cowork, you can also delegate multistep work that brings together Excel models and analyses with other deliverables, from preparing a close package to developing an investment committee memo.
Across experiences, Work IQ grounds Copilot in relevant organizational knowledge, like the close calendar or deal-team conversations, so Copilot can work from more than the file in front of you.
From preparing a month-end close to evaluating an acquisition, we’re building Copilot for the breadth of finance.
Streamline corporate accounting work
New accounting capabilities, available in Frontier for Copilot in Excel and Cowork, help accountants spend less time on repetitive, manual tasks in the places they already work, including:
- Reconcile accounts with confidence: Compare balances and transactions, identify discrepancies, and prepare reconciling items for review.
- Prepare journal entries faster: Draft accruals, reclassifications, allocations, reversals, and recurring entries, with checks for required inputs and balanced entries.
- Turn results into clear reporting: Analyze <a href="https://bitcomme.com/coastal-financial-corporation-q3-2026-earnings-call-summary/” title=”Coastal Financial Corporation Q3 2026 Earnings Call Summary”>financial performance against plan, identify key drivers, and prepare reporting that explains what changed and why.
Additional capabilities span audit, tax, financial planning and analysis (FP&A), compliance, and training.
Accountants are already putting these capabilities to work. In seven days of limited Insiders availability, more than 8,000 unique users invoked accounting skills more than 44,000 times across more than 18,000 Copilot conversations.
In Excel, finance professionals will also have the option to start an audit trail whenever they invoke an accounting capability. If selected, this will create a record in their chat history of what Copilot changed and why.
Simplify capital markets analysis
With the Capital Markets pluginfor Cowork, professionals across banking, research, private equity, and wealth management can delegate end-to-end workflows like a project that moves fromief or recommendation. A couple examples of how Cowork can help with multistep tasks are:
- Prepare an investment case for review: Bring together company financials, filings, market data, and transaction materials; build the supporting models; compare opportunities; and draft a sourced recommendation for the investment team to evaluate.
- Test an acquisition thesis: Define a peer set and build trading comparables from dated sources; then test the proposed transaction in a leveraged buyout (LBO) model, with sourced inputs and analyst assumptions kept distinct for review.
Additional capabilities span three-statement modeling, discounted cash flow (DCF) valuation, merger modeling, confidential information memorandum (CIM) review, earnings notes, investment committee memos, and client portfolio reviews.
Move finance work forward
With the new Finance pluginfor Cowork, corporate finance teams can now go beyond a single file to delegate work across files and conversations. Cowork can help prepare the analysis, briefing, and follow-up communications needed for review before acting. A couple examples of how Cowork can help with multistep finance tasks are:
- Prepare a close review package: Bring together close updates, identify blockers and risks, investigate the variances that need explanation, and draft commentary and follow-ups for the team to review.
- Carry a forecast review through to leadership: Consolidate budget inputs, identify changes that need an explanation, prepare a forecast-review brief with the supporting spreadsheets, presentation, and follow-up communications.
Additional capabilities span stakeholder Q&A, quarterly workbacks, audit evidence packages, expense itemization, and dataset analysis.
See how Lina Rebouh, Frontier Finance Learning Lead from the Microsoft Finance team, uses Cowork to run a forecast update and view the full video here:
Connected across systems and data
More of the data behind finance work is coming to Copilot.
For corporate finance, a lot of that data may live in Microsoft Dynamics 365. The Dynamics 365 ERP apps plugin brings finance and operations data and workflows into Copilot, helping professionals move from information to action. For example, accountants can use the plugin to prepare journal entries and supporting schedules using data directly from their system of record.
But finance data rarely lives in just one system. Fabric IQ makes governed Microsoft Fabric data actionable, starting with Microsoft Power BI reports and semantic models that finance teams can carry into deeper analysis.
Beyond Microsoft, partner plugins bring even more of the finance ecosystem into Copilot. We’re working with partners across areas including:
- Accounting, planning, and financial management: Intuit QuickBooks, Xero, and Zoho Books.
- Company, credit, and risk intelligence: CB Insights, D&B Finance Analytics, D&B Risk Analytics, Daloopa, Fitch Solutions, IBISWorld, Moody’s, and Verisk.
- Investment analysis and wealth management: FactSet, Morningstar, Orion, Quartr, Reflexivity, Rogo, and Samaya.
- Market data, research, and news: Fiscal AI, LSEG, MT Newswires, S&P Global, S&P Global Energy, Statista, and Zacks.
- Spend management and business banking: Mercury.
As the ecosystem grows, finance teams can bring more of the systems and information they already use into Copilot.
Third-party services may require separate licensing, subscriptions, authentication, or administrator enablement from the respective provider.
How finance teams are using Copilot
Finance teams are already putting these capabilities to work:
At EY Ireland, we have had early access to Accounting Skills in Copilot in Excel and have used it to streamline our weekly reporting. It lets us reference multiple documents and generate detailed analysis and commentary from reconciled data. By bringing multiple data points together logically and using custom skills, Accounting Skills can produce reasoned analysis. We are still testing the functionality, but we are excited about its potential for wider use across the firm. Early indications are that it can deliver higher-quality, more timely insights in a fraction of the time traditionally required. As this forms part of our weekly reporting, the potential benefit across the team is significant.”
—Cyril Mannion, Strategic Reporting and Analysis Lead, EY Ireland
Cowork helped Finance unblock workflows by moving from static reports to dynamic dashboards that deliver actionable insights in hours instead of weeks. Our Expense Command Center highlights monthly trends and outliers, while our Vendor Spend Dashboard lets leaders drill into spending by vendor, executive owner and cost center—turning expense reporting into a tool for targeted action. We also brought separate manual journal-entry reviews into one dashboard to prioritize elimination and consolidation opportunities—shifting Finance from reporting what happened to deciding what to do next.”
—Brad Foss, Vice President of Digital Platform Delivery, Zurich Insurance North America
Trusted for financial work
Financial work demands more than an answer. Professionals need to examine the sources and assumptions behind the work, trace what changed, and determine which edits belong in the final result.
Copilot is designed to support that review. In Excel, Copilot’s context extends beyond the workbook’s current state to the history of how it evolved. With this context, Copilot can summarize recent activity, identify when specific changes were made and by whom, and explain how they may have affected the analysis. It can also selectively reverse individual edits without disrupting the rest of the workbook, giving professionals greater control over the final result.
Across experiences, Copilot processes prompts and responses within the Microsoft 365 service boundary with enterprise data protection. It works only with content each user can access, honors existing permissions and sensitivity labels, and does not use prompts, responses, or documents to train the underlying foundation models.
Copilot helps move the work forward. Finance professionals retain control of the recommendations, decisions, approvals, and actions that follow.
Get started
With Copilot, finance professionals can spend less time pulling the work together and more time applying their expertise to the decisions that move the business forward. New finance capabilities are available across Copilot in Excel and Cowork:
- Accounting capabilities in Copilot in Excel and Cowork: Available in Frontier.
- Finance skills in Copilot in Excel: Generally available.
- Capital Markets and Finance plugins in Cowork: Generally available.
- Dynamics 365 ERP apps plugin: Beginning to roll out through the Microsoft plugin registry.
- Fabric IQ: Generally available in Cowork.
- Partner plugins: Beginning to roll out through the Microsoft plugin registry.
