TL;DR

This preview feature in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central uses Copilot to automatically generate sales lines from an email or a file. Whether clients send requests in free text or CSV format, Copilot parses the data and inserts it directly into a sales order, reducing manual data entry and improving efficiency.

Introduction to Copilot in Business Central

I want to show you a preview of some new Copilot functionality in Dynamics 365 Business Central.

This was starting to be released in 2024 Release Wave 1 and Wave 2, and right now it’s in Business Central. It’s still in preview mode.

So this is nice because I think they’re going to add to this, which is good, but this shows you that Microsoft is pushing down the Copilot functionality into their ERP systems and also in a functional manner, so it makes it easier to do certain things.

For example, we’ll take a look at how to create sales documents with it. There’s existing functionality in predicting payments from accounts receivable and also analyzing and creating bank reconciliations.

So this is exciting because Microsoft’s going to continue to add more Copilot functionality in different ways as it progresses.

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Using Copilot to Create Sales Orders

From an Email

What I want to specifically show you today is how Copilot can take information from a list of items or from an email and create a sales order from that.

It’s pretty easy to use, so let’s take a look at it. I’m going to create a sales order. Let’s use the sales order right here.

I’ve got this email here from a client. Let’s open it up. And the client is asking for a sales order based on these items here. So I’ve got all the information I need.

I’m going to use Copilot to do this. And what Copilot will do is parse this information and put it into the sales order.

So let’s copy it from here. Let’s go back to the sales order. Here’s a sales order. Here’s a Copilot dropdown. Let’s take a look at that. I’m going to suggest sales lines.

It gives me the space here and all I’m going to do is copy the information from the email into this. There it is. It’s not structured and we’re just going to generate the sales lines from that.

So here are the lines that Copilot suggests, and this is exactly what my client sent me. So I’m just going to insert those. And now we have new lines in the sales order.

If you didn’t want to use Copilot, you could easily copy and paste into this form, but it takes more time, more structure. Copilot does a lot of that work for you automatically.

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From a CSV File

So let’s start another order. And I’m going to use Copilot to create the lines in the sales order. But I’m going to have a look at a file to get that information.

Here’s the information in a CSV file. The CSV file format is what Copilot needs at this time to create those sales lines.

Let’s go back to Business Central, and this time I’m going to Copilot. I’m going to get the lines from a file and look up the file here.

It took the file and automatically created the lines. You can see that I’ve got the quantities here. I’ve got the numbers coming from the inventory system and I’ve got the units of measure.

This finds exactly what I wanted. I want to insert those in the sales order, and now I’ve got a new sales order based on the information in the file.

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Why This Helps

So if you do a lot of data entry and you’ve got clients who are sending you the information in email or in a file, this is an easy way to get it into Business Central.

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Conclusion

If you’re ready to deploy Copilot in Microsoft 365, download our free guide with the link in our video description.