The new Expense Agent in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central fundamentally modernizes expense management.
Managing expenses (such as travel costs or office supplies) is one of the most time-consuming administrative processes in many companies. Receipts must be collected, expenses recorded, policies checked, and approvals obtained – often still involving a significant amount of manual work. This ties up valuable resources in finance departments and can also lead to delays and errors.
However, the new Expense Agent in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central now greatly simplifies expense management. Through the use of artificial intelligence and seamless integration with applications such as Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft 365 Copilot, expenses can be processed significantly faster and more efficiently. Employees simply submit receipts, while the agent automatically recognizes, categorizes, and prepares the information for further processing.
Expense management as an automated AI process
The Expense Agent transforms expense management into a fully automated, AI-driven process. This eliminates the need for manual data entry, reduces errors, and speeds up reimbursement cycles. Thanks to integration with Outlook, Teams, Copilot Chat, and Business Central, employees can now easily submit expenses while ensuring compliance with company policies. This provides companies with greater efficiency and transparency, improved accuracy, and real-time visibility into expense data, allowing finance teams to refocus on strategic tasks.
The Expense Agent focuses on:
- End-to-end automation: Captures receipts via email, camera, or direct communication; uses a language model to extract details such as expense categories; and then automatically generates reports.
- AI-driven intelligence: Detects anomalies and duplicates, identifies attendees for entertainment events, automatically calculates expenses, and performs per diem calculations.
- Integration points: Works in a web app, Outlook, and Copilot Chat, with Business Central processing the postings and resulting journal entries.
- Approval workflow: Supports approvals, policy checks, and reminders
The agent automatically extracts relevant information from receipts that have been scanned, uploaded via a web app, or forwarded via email, and uses this information to populate key fields such as category, amount, currency, merchant, payment method, date, receipt number, and a context-based description. It records the expenses and, if applicable, also identifies per diem claims based on travel documents. Users can then link the expenses to projects or mark them as reimbursed.
The agent also groups expenses within a defined time period into an expense report and can automatically submit them for approval if approval is enabled and no policy violations are detected. A redesigned approval interface supports approvers and prepares the expense reports for posting.
Currently, the Expense Agent is only available in a preview version and in English—additional regions and languages are planned for the future.
