Turn finance into a growth engine, one small win at a time

• Microsoft Copilot offers finance teams benefits including faster month-end close, automated reporting and dashboards, real-time forecasting and strengthened compliance.

• Datacom’s Frontier Firm framework guides Copilot use maturity from trusting (Copilot as an assistant), to transcending (human-led agent teams), to transforming (where agents orchestrate at scale).

• With Datacom and Copilot, finance teams can move from doing tasks to orchestrating intelligent agents and using Agent 365 as a central governance and monitoring hub. 

If you work in a finance team, you would have experienced tasks that take up more time than you’d like. Across all sectors, despite technology advances, often month-end drags, invoices go astray and reporting steals entire afternoons. Reconciling ledgers, validating entries and spotting unusual spikes is necessary, but painfully repetitive. Productivity and customer experience suffers, and teams spend more time firefighting than forecasting. 

Datacom and Microsoft Copilot can help you chip away at these pain points, including streamlining policy checks and reconciliations, identifying miscoding and expediting approvals with these small wins all adding up to big savings of time and money.

“The future of finance isn’t about replacing people, it’s about amplifying their capability. And it starts with your next month-end close. Finance teams thrive on trust and efficiency. Copilot helps them deliver both by automating the grunt work, embedding compliance and streamlining it and freeing the team for strategic, customer-facing tasks,” says Tim Darbyshire, Senior Functional Consultant, App D365 Customer Engagement, Datacom. 

By enabling Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat, and having good data and governance foundations, your organisation can enjoy quick wins without complex artificial intelligence (AI) deployments. Improvements you could experience include:

• Simplified month-end close: Copilot connects to your enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform and Excel to reconcile ledgers so you can validate entries and prepare compliance-ready documentation in minutes instead of days. You’ll also be able to highlight anomalies and historical patterns.
• Automated reporting and dashboards: Copilot in Excel and Power BI consolidates data across sources, narrates trends and turns analysis into shareable visuals fast.
• Policy and compliance checks on the fly: Copilot Chat can verify purchase orders or expense claims against organisational policies, reducing approval bottlenecks and preventing non-compliant transactions before they happen.
• Invoice and expense validation: M365 Copilot can extract invoice details from emails or PDFs, cross-check them against purchase orders and flag discrepancies for review, cutting manual effort and reducing fraud risk.
• Real-time forecasting and scenario modelling: Finance teams can ask Copilot in Excel to run what-if analyses on budgets or funding allocations, visualise impacts and share insights with leadership.

“These aren’t moonshots; they’re the compound interest of daily time savings without the need for bespoke application coding. Ten minutes saved on five different tasks across the team becomes hours back every week,” says Darbyshire. 

This is down to Copilot’s integration with Excel, ERP systems (like Dynamics 365 Finance) and low-friction natural-language prompts. As this connectivity is inbuilt within the Microsoft ecosystem, enabling Copilot is an easier case to make for leadership teams. 

Once you’ve powered productivity with Copilot, the next step is scaling and evolving how your teams work. Datacom’s Frontier Firm framework maps this journey in three phases: Trust → Transcend → Transform.

It starts by building trust in Copilot as an assistant that removes the drudgery and then moving to human-led agent teams, where AI becomes a digital colleague. The next step is transforming into a model where humans set strategy and agents orchestrate workflows at scale.

“This shift empowers leaders to become agent bosses, designing and managing intelligent agents that amplify impact across finance,” says Darbyshire.

“Datacom can help you enable Agent 365 the central command centre for your enterprise’s AI agents. It gives leaders a single view to monitor agent activity, enforce governance and manage permissions, turning isolated automations into a managed ecosystem.”  

Imagine you need to verify subcontractor billing, cross-checking hours between a provider’s statement and your internal system. Traditionally, that’s a tedious manual task. With agentic AI via Copilot Studio, you don’t do the work, you design the agent that does it for you. In under 30 minutes, without writing a single line of code, you can build an agent that automates this check every time.

The time it takes to create the agent is about the same as doing the task once, manually. But now that agent runs the process repeatedly, saving those 30 minutes each time.

“Multiply that timesaving across dozens of similar workflows and the return on investment becomes undeniable. This is what it means to be an agent boss – shifting from doing the work to orchestrating intelligent agents that optimise repeatable processes at scale,” says Darbyshire. 

Agentic AI doesn’t just automate, it makes finance adaptive and future-ready. While the possibilities are endless, here are two practical examples of how Copilot is already transforming finance and solving common challenges our enterprise customers face every day.

• Update rules in real time. When regulations or internal policies change, just describe the new requirement in natural language and your AI agent updates your rules engine instantly. No coding. No delays.
• Fraud detection that never sleeps. Models learn continuously from flagged cases, spotting emerging patterns and suggesting new prevention rules to strengthen controls before issues escalate. 

As a Microsoft Copilot Specialist partner, Datacom helps organisations personalise the powerful potential of Copilot to their business vision, people and industry. 

Datacom’s Frontier Firm framework is designed to move you confidently through every stage of AI maturity, unlocking Copilot’s full agentic potential and delivering rapid, tangible business value in the process. 

Ready to build tomorrow’s finance team today? Talk to your Datacom account manager about our Copilot workshops and enablement programmes, such as  Starting with Microsoft 365 Copilot and  Copilot Chat enablement  and unlock Copilot’s vast potential in a low-risk way.