Introduction to the new AI-powered capabilities with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance

Posted on: February 21, 2022 | By: Guy Logan | Microsoft Dynamics AX/365, Microsoft Dynamics Manufacturing

AI is transforming the finance industry. Hop on this bandwagon by using Microsoft’s Finance Insights to improve the efficiency and quality of financial processes by using intelligent automation. Finance Insights is a set of AI-powered capabilities that can be applied to all kinds of manual processes, cutting down the time it takes to accomplish these mundane tasks and the many mistakes that often come with them.

For example, let’s say you need to forecast your cash flow in order to roadmap upcoming short, mid, and long-term investments. However, you find that the data is scattered over several systems, gathering and making sense of it all takes a long time, and forecasting is at best, a guess with accuracy, a major issue, there is a solution for that.

Unleashing cash flow forecasting on the job automatically integrates data from internal and external systems to one place, models it, and creates cash flow forecasts that are more accurate, saving both time and money. This is also a great way to continuously compare actuals against past forecasts to monitor your performance.

If that sounds like something your company would find useful, read this blog to learn more about Dynamics 365 Finance Insights.

 

Reshaping corporate financial management

A core set of financial management processes and systems support the work of every organization. Yet, while digital transformation has significantly impacted business solutions in workloads like commerce, manufacturing, and warehousing, not much has changed for financial processes, at least by comparison.

AI and intelligent automation will transform financial workloads. Just as Microsoft Excel transformed finance departments following its release over thirty years ago, AI and machine learning are positioned to reshape corporate financial management–making routine and error-prone tasks more efficient, focused, and accurate.

Applying AI in finance

Finance professionals have heard a lot about the promise of AI, machine learning, and robotic process automation (RPA) in recent years. However, what has been missing from the discussion were concrete examples of where to apply these emerging technologies to drive higher value outcomes and improve our business and financial processes. Finance insights bridge this gap with customer payment insights, cash flow forecasting, and intelligent budget proposals.

Customer payment insights

Traditionally, it has been a challenge for businesses to predict when customers will pay their invoices. This lack of insight leads to less accurate cash flow forecasts, collection processes that start too late, and orders released to customers who may default on the payment.

But what if organizations were able to predict if a customer would pay their invoice on time? Or if they will pay it late?

Customer payment insights empower organizations to predict when an invoice will be paid by applying machine learning to financial data. This new capability enables Dynamics 365 Finance to learn from historical invoices, payments, and customer data and is nothing short of transformative for the collection process.

Customer payments insights effectively shift the collection process from reactive to proactive by allowing companies to act on data-driven, AI-derived predictions to proactively automate the task of following up with at-risk customers.

Cash flow forecasting

Cash flow is critical to every business. Even profitable companies can become insolvent by failing to maintain the cash flow required to fund operations. The cash flow forecasting capability in finance insights helps companies avoid this undesirable outcome by more effectively monitoring and managing their cash balances.

Intelligent cash flow forecasting enables automatic integration from external systems and reports and uses machine learning to help businesses forecast cash flows more accurately than was previously possible. With more accurate forecasts, managers make more effective decisions, optimizing opportunities within the context of their current cash position. Intelligent cash flow forecasting also enables automatic integration from external systems and reports.

Using time-series, cash flow forecasting in combination with customer payment predictions improves overall cash flow accuracy. The ability to save cash flow forecasts and compare against actual financial results further enables organizations to measure forecast performance and prepare more accurate forecasts in the future.

Intelligent budget proposals

Organizations spend a significant amount of time and resources preparing budgets. Much of this time is spent scrubbing historical data to enable an accurate view of history, a repetitive and low-value add process.

Budget proposals help alleviate much of this work by providing a streamlined mechanism to prepare multiple years of history, analyze the data, and predict what the budget or forecast should look like based on what has happened over time.

Transformational capabilities

Finance insights bring AI and automation functionality to Dynamics 365 Finance to enable data and outcome-driven finance. It is a true game-changer, redefining transactional finance and empowering data and outcome-driven finance. As we have seen here, this is accomplished by effectively leveraging AI, machine learning, and intelligent automation in an interrelated set of three new financial management tools: customer payment insights, cash flow forecasting, and budget proposals.

These tools will allow finance organizations to drive better business decision-making by providing new AI-driven business insights that are clearer and faster while also improving operational efficiency by utilizing intelligent automation. At Microsoft, we are truly excited to make these transformational capabilities available and look forward to adding additional features to finance insights soon.

---

---