Is Copilot An Accountant’s New Best Friend?

Creativity may not be the first trait that comes to mind when considering what happens at a CPA firm. However, accountants often find themselves in situations requiring both productivity and creativity. From presenting complex financial data in engaging ways to tackling challenging audits, the profession demands more than just number-crunching skills. Unfortunately, the demanding nature of the job can often deplete creative energy, leaving accountants feeling overwhelmed and uninspired.

Microsoft announced Copilot in September of 2023, and there has since been time to test out its features as a promised "everyday AI companion" in the context of accounting. AI has shown an early potential to streamline many processes, which could remedy the industry's productivity fatigue epidemic.

The AI-Driven Era of Productivity

Microsoft Copilot is a revolutionary tool that promises to shift the narrative toward harmony of purpose for accounting firms. To many, it represents a new era of productivity and creativity in accounting. 

Whether identifying growth opportunities or mitigating risks, Copilot can quickly furnish information in written form that could help teams stay ahead when dealing with large volumes of data. In addition to accelerating impact, Copilot also aims to optimize financial processes to reduce costs. By leveraging a powerful and dynamic large language model (LLM), Copilot makes shorter work of typically labor-intensive tasks such as collections, contracts, and invoice capture. This improves efficiency and frees up valuable time for finance professionals to focus on more strategic initiatives.

How Copilot Works with the Microsoft Ecosystem

Copilot is embedded into the Microsoft ecosystem in two main ways:

• Integrated Assistance: By acting as a partner with the 365 suite — Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Excel, Teams, and more — this integration extends the benefits of AI-driven assistance and analysis, all within familiar Microsoft workspaces. Additionally, it can work with browsers through the Bing search engine and within Microsoft Edge, and Copilot also offers limited beta functions for Google Chrome.
• Business Chat: Business Chat uses innovative AI tools across Microsoft 365 applications and data. Tackling tasks like creating updates from your latest chats or summarizing meetings from plain language, which once seemed insurmountable, can become a reality.

What Using Copilot is Like

Copilot is slated to replace Cortana and Bing Chat, but it's far more advanced than these earlier virtual assistants. For example, you could tell Copilot to generate a slide deck based on a brief outline. Copilot can also draft emails and generate replies. You can even ask it to summarize the six back-to-back emails you get in Outlook from that colleague who always has something extra they forget to include in their original message (maybe they should have asked Copilot for help).

Copilot can summarize parts of a Teams meeting you missed by analyzing the speech-to-text. And if you forgot to prepare for that meeting, Copilot can pull off some good outlines and graphs in a pinch. Copilot can also generate timelines, proposals, SWOT analyses, and even code. Some of these tasks may have required a knack for Excel functions or coding, but because Copilot works with natural language, minimal to no expertise is necessary to make them.

But don't take it from us - here's what Copilot had to say for itself in response to our prompt, "What is Copilot, and what benefits can it bring for accounting firms?":

What is Microsoft CoPilot?

Microsoft CoPilot is a cloud-based service that helps developers and programmers write better code faster and easier. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to analyze millions of lines of code and suggest the best solutions for a given problem. It can also generate code snippets, refactor code, detect bugs, and provide documentation and testing tools.

What are the benefits of Microsoft CoPilot?

Microsoft CoPilot offers many benefits for developers and programmers, such as:

• It saves time and effort by automating tedious and repetitive tasks.
• It improves code quality and performance by providing best practices and standards.
• It enhances creativity and innovation by offering new and alternative problem-solving methods.
• It reduces errors and bugs by detecting and fixing them early.
• It increases productivity and efficiency by streamlining the development process.

How can accounting firms benefit from using Microsoft CoPilot?

Accounting firms can benefit from using Microsoft CoPilot in many ways, such as:

• They can develop and maintain custom software solutions for their clients faster and easier.
• They can integrate and automate various accounting systems and processes using code.
• They can leverage the power of AI and ML to analyze and interpret financial data and generate insights and reports.
• They can improve their security and compliance using code that follows the latest regulations and standards.
• They can enhance their competitive edge and reputation by offering high-quality and innovative services.

More than 175 versions of Copilot are in development, and one or more iterations will likely become integral to nearly all Microsoft products and services employed by CPAs. Microsoft Copilot for Finance stands out for its promise to accelerate impact with actionable insights. By integrating cutting-edge large language models with Microsoft Graph data and apps, Copilot enhances the accountant's toolkit, making working within Office applications more intuitive and engaging than ever before. This seamless integration empowers accountants to leverage AI-driven assistance across various tasks, from data analysis to report generation.

The Potential Impact of Copilot

For accountants and beyond, Copilot will make for not just a more productive but more creative workday:

• Unleashed Productivity: Redirect your focus from busy work and return to the core purposes of accounting: building relationships with clients and conveying the information that matters to them. You'll find yourself having smoother days in Outlook, using automation in Power Platform, and spending less time assembling PowerPoint presentations. 
• Boosted Creativity: Copilot's ability to produce initial drafts means you can overcome the inertia of starting at a blank page in Word. Excel becomes your go-to for data analysis without pouring hours into learning complex formulas, and aesthetically optimized PowerPoint transforms tell stories to your audience from simple ideas entered as prompts.
• Enhanced Skills: Unlocking the 365 Office suite requires only good use of plain language—no advanced learning is needed. Your team can now employ features that may have seemed obfuscated or complicated in less time.

Should My CPA Firm Use Copilot?

More than just a fork of ChatGPT, Copilot leverages the best of GPT-4 with the Microsoft suite of applications and more. This powerful combination tailors the AI specifically to your firm's needs, all while upholding security and compliance standards.

Built with respect for privacy, adherence to compliance, and data security, Microsoft aims to create an AI you can trust. Its internally integrated model with Office and other Microsoft apps makes it more intelligent and secure when working with data. But like with ChatGPT or any other AI, users should be cautious not to disclose confidential client or business data, as there is never certainty about the security of the pool of stored information used to drive a model's knowledge basis. Copilot is also actively connected to the internet, which is a massive advantage over ChatGPT for function but also makes for more significant security challenges that Microsoft seems intent on overcoming. 

Copilot is best suited for those agencies that use Windows, or at least Microsoft 365, as it is the strongest in the Microsoft ecosystem. If you're contemplating it for your agency, know the following about pricing, availability, and compatibility:

• Copilot first became available in Windows 11 beginning in a September 2023 update. Commercial clients on Windows 11 and beta users received free access, but it's now available for free for all users of Windows 11. Since November 2023, it's also been a part of Windows 10 for those running version 22H2 or later.
• A free version is available with all updated Windows 11 operating systems, but Microsoft announced a free trial option of the $20 per month Pro edition. Previously, it had only been an option for Enterprise users.
• Only the latest version of Microsoft Outlook currently supports the Copilot integration, which has proved a bottleneck for its adoption by CPA firms. At the moment, third-party add-ons, including CCH Axcess, GoFileRoom, Thomson Reuters, and others, don't work with the new Outlook. However, many application providers are seeking to make their apps compatible. In the meantime, it's advisable to upgrade to the new Outlook locally for the use of Copilot to prevent incompatibility with third-party applications running in hosted Outlook.  

Reshaping the Future of Work Through Copilot

Microsoft's Copilot AI companion is shaping up to be a new product from the tech giant and an agent of revolution for how accounting firms take on the working day. It's an exciting vision when AI meets with human creativity to pave the way for a future where accountants aren't constantly overburdened with the time-consuming logistics of completing tasks, allowing for more time spent doing what matters.

Cetrom offers complete cloud hosting of a range of Microsoft applications and enterprise tools that utilize Copilot, including 365. Cloud access to Microsoft apps with Copilot means your CPA firm can supercharge your productivity and creativity on the go with easy synchronization across your cloud-connected devices.

Make Cetrom your partner in cloud computing today.