Copilot now reconciles your accounts. Who signs off?

Microsoft put finance skills into Copilot in Excel in June. On 29 October it expanded them into something closer to a junior accountant. In the words of Brian Jones, who leads the Excel product group, the company is “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.”

Three of the new accounting capabilities will interest anyone who has ever closed a month. Reconciliation: “Compare balances and transactions, identify discrepancies, and prepare reconciling items for review.” Journal entries: “Draft accruals, reclassifications, allocations, reversals, and recurring entries, with checks for required inputs and balanced entries.”

Reporting: “Analyze financial performance against plan, identify key drivers, and prepare reporting that explains what changed and why.” Microsoft’s support page lists eight skills in an Accounting folder, among them reconciliation, close-management, variance-analysis and financial-statements, with a separate journal-entry skill, each invoked by typing @ and the skill name into the Copilot pane.