Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog

Tag: ai

  • Time & Expense Entry: The Task no one loves but is critical for all project/service-based organizations – Now Handled by AI Agents in Dynamics 365

    Time & Expense Entry: The Task no one loves but is critical for all project/service-based organizations – Now Handled by AI Agents in Dynamics 365

    Let’s dive into the new innovative Time Entry and Expense Entry AI Agents, which are now available in a production-ready preview within Dynamics 365 Project Operations and Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations! These are not just another feature; it’s a significant step forward in Agentic business applications that can truly transform how we handle project management.

    If you missed my last post about the AI Agentic T&E Approvals capability, you can read it here. That post mainly focused on simplifying and automating approval tasks for project managers.

    Why First Party Agents for Time & Expense Entry:

    Microsoft has released new AI agents in Dynamics 365 to make time and expense entry easier, a task often disliked in project work. These agents automate the process from capture to submission, cutting down on manual effort and mistakes. The integration with Dynamics 365 and Teams supports secure, efficient workflows. This is part of Microsoft’s effort to integrate AI into daily tasks, allowing employees to concentrate on more valuable work.

    The Benefits are aparent:

    • Reduced administrative overhead: Agents create Time and Expense Entries based on project bookings and receipts, saving time for employees. They review and submit these entries, allowing Finance teams and project leads to spend less time on follow-ups.
    • Accelerated billing cycles and cash flow: Real time and accurate capture of time and expenses ensure reduction is missed and incorrect T&E and faster invoice processing.
    • Improved Employee Experience: Employees interact with AI Agents within the flow of their work, i,e., Microsoft Teams. This reduces friction and improves adoption.

    Who this is for:

    If your organization uses Dynamics 365 Project Operations and/or Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, you can use these new agents. If you only use Dynamics 365 F&O for expense reporting, you can deploy the Expense Entry agent.

    Let’s see the Agents in Action:

    The Time Entry Agent understands your project assignments and bookings and does automated time entry for you. It can check previous weeks’ timesheets and create current week entries based on that. It also generates smart comments for entries by looking at the project task details like the description and project name. Additionally, it can analyze your Outlook meeting invites to make comments based on meeting event titles.

    You can review time entries created by the agent directly in Microsoft Teams, make changes as necessary and submit for approval. The agent also tracks unsubmitted entries and notifies you for proactive submission.

    The Expense Entry agent on the other hand is even more powerful. All I need to do as an employee is capture my receipts on my phone and send the captured images or PDF files to the mailbox used by the Expense agent. The rest is done by the agent for you. Here is what does for you.

    • Process the receipts from your email or the ones you uploaded via the expense app.
    • Extracts receipt info and create expense lines automatically.
    • Not only that, it goes ahead and creates the expense report for you based on trip or by project (based on config) and sends a live summary of the expense reports in Teams for you to review and submit.
    • Additionally, it can intelligently identify active projects and assign those based on project location matching if you do project-based expense reporting. If you do your reporting by trip, it can create reports based on the location of travel and associate receipts. The agent can read your calendar events to look into details which may have key details such as location, project ID/name and use it identify project IDs that the expenses needs to be associated to.

    As an employee, you go from just sending receipts to the agent to just reviewing your fully prepared expense report within Microsoft Teams for corrections or submissions. Putting things into perspective, I can see saving an average of 20-30 mins per expense report. More than the amount of time it saves for you, it is the tedious manual work you don’t have to do.

    How can you deploy these for your employees today:

    To deploy the production ready(preview) agents today for your workforce, you will need to ensure the underlying features are enabled and the agentic automation infrastructure is setup correctly. This is more of an administrative one-time setup to get the agents up and running.

    For the Time Entry Agent:

    • Ensure you are on version 4.140.0.239 or late for Project Operations.
    • Enable the Feature for Time and Expense Agent in Project Operations.
    • Activate the power automate flows (used by the agent to complete actions on behalf of the employees, such as create time entries, expense reports etc.)
    • Finally, publish the agents in Microsoft Copilot Studio and optionally share in Teams channel/apps for your employees to get the full experience.
    • Follow Microsoft official guidelines here.

    For the Expense Entry Agent:

    • Ensure you are on D365 F&O version 10.0.44 or later
    • Enable the features for “Immersive home and Agent management in F&O.
    • Setup the Agent behavior under the Expense management parameters.
    • Setup a shared mailbox (This is where your employees can send their receipts to or just upload via the expense mobile app).
    • Activate the power automate flows (used by the agent to complete actions on behalf of the employees, such as create time entries, expense reports etc.)
    • Finally, publish the agents in Microsoft Copilot Studio and optionally share in Teams channel/apps for your employees to get the full experience.
    • Follow Microsoft official guidelines here.

    Under the hood

    The agent orchestration is managed by Copilot Studio along with a set of key Power Automate flows for both the agents. For the expense agent, these flows perform actions such as extracting expense details from receipts, identifying project IDs, reviewing calendar events when necessary, generating expense reports, and sending them to employees via Teams cards. The process begins with a Power Automate flow that runs periodically to process emails containing receipts and added to the unattached receipts entity. The agent subsequently parses these receipts to extract information, creates unattached expense lines, links the receipts, identifies project IDs, and assembles the final expense report.

    Config Parameters that control the behavior of the Expense agent for report creation:

    Take the agents for a spin today and encourage your employees to take advantage of these.

    Regards

    Sandeep

  • Bridging Stocked Inventory and Project Delivery in Dynamics 365 Project Operations Integrated ERP Deployment – A True Game Changer!

    Bridging Stocked Inventory and Project Delivery in Dynamics 365 Project Operations Integrated ERP Deployment – A True Game Changer!

    Microsoft has just closed a critical gap in Dynamics 365 Project Operations with the release of “Manage Stocked Products for Integrated ERP Deployments.” For leaders overseeing material-intensive projects in construction, engineering, field services, this is the missing link that finally aligns inventory control with project delivery in a unified ERP architecture.

    With this feature, organizations can now:

    • Gain real-time visibility into on-hand inventory via Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain Management
    • Track material usage across the full project lifecycle—from estimation to invoicing
    • Automate cost and revenue recognition tied to stocked product consumption
    • Eliminate reliance on Project Management and Accounting module in F&O and start thinking about migrating to the modern architecture of Project Operations

    For project executives and operations leaders, this capability is more than a feature, it’s a strategic lever. It streamlines material tracking, strengthens cost control, and enables real-time inventory visibility, driving smarter decisions and faster execution across complex, resource and material intensive projects.

    I was finally able to get my hands on this preview feature, and I am excited to share some insights. I am not going to discuss the step by step of how to enable the new feature. You need to make sure you are on the latest versions of D365 Project Operations (4.1.142.0 or later) and F&O (10.0.44 or later) and work your way through the necessary dual-write setups.

    Let’s get to the crux of what this new feature offers.

    Viewing Inventory Products in Project Operations:

    Dynamics 365 F&SCM serves as the main source for managing inventory. Both stocked and non-stocked products are created and managed in D365 F&SCM. New products are immediately visible in Dynamics 365 Project Operations for project managers and stakeholders.

    When this new feature is enabled, you will see the new Products menu/site map where you can view all products that came in from D365 F&O SCM automatically. This leverages the “unified products management/integration” between F&O ERP and Microsoft Dataverse.

    Product Cost and Sales Prices:

    D365 F&SCM offers comprehensive pricing engine for products and is the source of truth for the cost and sales price data for products. The standard cost and sales prices specified for the product in D365 F&SCM automatically sync over to Project operations again using the “unified product integration architecture”, where they sync the prices into the cost and sales price lists within D365 Project Operations.

    For now, this feature uses the defaults prices for the products, however I am fully expecting this to mature into leveraging the “On demand D365 SCM pricing engine” at some point in the future.

    Viewing available on-hand for stocked inventory products:

    On the Products page within Project Operations, Project managers/stakeholders can view on-hand inventory products if required. This comes in handy where they get visibility into real time inventory without having to navigate to D365 F&O.

    Include stocked products in project estimates, quotes/contracts:

    Project Managers and stakeholders who are working on project quotations, estimations or project contracts can now include stocked inventory products.

    Buying stocked inventory for projects:

    Project managers or Procurement managers can now include stocked inventory materials on purchase orders they created for a project in the integrated ERP deployment.

    Important Note: Project Operations in the Integrated ERP deployment already supports non-stocked items/procurement category-based purchase orders, however with the introduction of the support for stocked inventory products, there is a difference in when the costs of the stocked materials are posted to the project and general ledger. As soon as the PO is confirmed, the necessary accounting distributions are created using the ledger posting profile for Items for projects. This accounting distribution is used to post the cost to the project and GL as soon as the vendor invoice associated with the PO for the stocked product is posted in F&O. This behavior is different than how it posts in case of a PO that has non-stocked products or procurement categories where the costs are posted to a temporary procurement integration account and synced later from Project Ops Dataverse using the actuals integration journal. Little technical details, but important for consultants!

    Posting vendor invoices for stocked products on projects:

    When vendor invoice for the purchase order for stocked products is recorded and posted, the project costs are posted in D365 F&O into the project sub-ledger. The vendor invoice information automatically syncs over to Dataverse to generate cost and unbilled sales actuals and unbilled sales actual details comes back into F&O using the actuals integration journal.

    Note: As products are received at the warehouse, the product receipt transactions are not recorded in the Project actuals in Dataverse and don’t post to project sub-ledger in F&O. As this feature matures and adds more capability, I am hoping we will see capability where we can consume the cost of stocked products immediately upon product receipt. It is not supported at this in this release at least.

    Viewing on-hand and Consuming stocked inventory into projects:

    For existing inventory in stock, project managers can not only view real time available on-hand information for stocked products but also consume them into projects using the materials usage log of Project Operations.

    Dynamics 365 Project Operations validates the available on-hand inventory in real time here. If a material usage request was submitted for a quantity that is more than the available quantity for the Site and Warehouse, then the system throws error message there by blocking the submission. Similar validation is done upon approvals of material usage logs.

    Note: You can also consume stocked materials using the journal entry option if required.

    Inventory Costing, Project Costing & Adjustments:

    When materials are consumed using the material usage log in project operations, it uses the default cost price available for the product/material that was last synced from F&O.

    However, for stocked products, the consumption of inventory always happens at the weighted average cost of the item regardless of the costing method for the material.

    If the costs of the material transactions that came in the integration actuals journals differs from the weighted average cost of the material, the difference is synchronized back to Dataverse. This value is stored in a distinct data field named “Adjustment value” and it updates the Extended amount accordingly. There is a new batch job as part of this new feature that needs to setup and run which will basically sync these adjustments if any after the “Inventory Closing and adjustments” have been run in D365 F&O.

    That’s it for this post!!

    Best,

    Sandeep

  • Unlock faster time tracking, approvals, reduced revenue leakage, and accelerated billing with the new Time and Expense Agent in D365 Project Operations

    Unlock faster time tracking, approvals, reduced revenue leakage, and accelerated billing with the new Time and Expense Agent in D365 Project Operations

    For project and service driven organizations, accurately capturing and processing time and expenses is a balancing act between operational efficiency and revenue integrity. Manual entry delays, inconsistent submissions, and incomplete data can cause serious ripple effects—ranging from incorrect approvals, billing errors to delayed client invoicing and, ultimately, revenue leakage.

    Enter the new Time & Expense agent in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations, a game-changer designed to automate and streamline this critical process. Built on Microsoft Copilot Studio and the Power Platform, this intelligent agent not only empowers your employees to submit time and expense entries more quickly and accurately by staying in their flow of work within Microsoft Teams but also automates T&E reviews for project managers giving real-time visibility into project costs. The result? Faster time and expense approvals processing cycles, improved project accounting, and minimized revenue loss.

    The Agent is now in Production Ready Preview! If you’ve updated your solution to version 4.140.0.239 or later, you should already see it in action. While I’m still diving into the details of the Time and Expense Entry experience, I wanted to share a few quick thoughts on the Approvals Experience today. More insights to come soon—stay tuned!

    The new T&E Agent in Project Operations will transform the way your organization thinks about processing T&E entries and approvals. By simply uploading your organization’s T&E policy document, the agent intelligently interprets approval rules—automatically distinguishing which entries are “Ready to Approve” and which ones “Need Review.”

    Furthermore, it can process approvals for compliant entries on its own, significantly reducing the manual effort involved in reviewing each submission. This means project managers and approvers can focus their attention where it’s truly needed, while the agent takes care of the rest.

    The T&E policy document can look something like the below screenshot.

    You can just upload the policy document into D365 Project Operations under the Agent setup parameter area and agent does the rest of the work for you.

    Now that the policy document is in place, let’s see how the approval experience helps accelerate the T&E approvals.

    Let’s now go ahead and create, submit time entry. Bye the way, screenshot below shows the newly released Calendar view of the time entry which is Awesome. I strongly recommend you explore this further!

    Under the hood is an Approvals agent trigger which is a Cloud Flow that runs on a recurrence and gets the input parameters of each time entry lines that were submitted, parses JSON and passes on the dataset to the Copilot agent in Copilot studio.

    The agent configured in Copilot Studio has the detailed instructions, access to the policy document that we uploaded in Project Operations and agent tools (AIPlugin actions) to process the approval actions.

    Let’s now get back to D365 Project Operations and see how the agent flagged and/approved the submitted time entries. You can see the agent was able to flag the time entries as “Needs review” since they violated several of the policies. However, it was able to automatically approve the time I submitted on the “Holiday” project since my policy had an exception for that.

    It looks like our organization’s T&E policies are quite detailed—they even account for factors like resource assignment periods, task start and end dates and require all time entries to align with those parameters. The good news? The new agent gives you full flexibility to configure approval rules based on what best suits your business. Whether your policies are light-touch or highly granular, the agent adapts to reflect your organization’s expectations.

    Notice the agent was able not only able to flag but also was able to tell what policy the time entry line violated. From here, the approvers can take further actions on the time entry such as Approve/Reject or reassign to agent.

    So, what are the key take aways and how does the Approvals Agent benefit your organization?

    1. With the T&E agent, what was once a reactive, error-prone process is now a proactive, intelligent system that supports compliance, accelerates cash flow, and empowers teams to focus on delivering value—not chasing down hours and receipts.
    2. Reduces administrative effort and approval errors for Project Managers while speeding up T&E processing and project throughput. Project Managers gets to focus only on the flagged transactions and not thousands of lines that already meets the policies of the organization.
    3. Accelerates billing and enhances financial accuracy through automated, compliant time approvals. As long as time entries meet policies, they are automatically approved.
    4. As your organization adopts new changes according to changing business conditions, they just need to keep their policy document up to date and upload them in Project Operations and the agent will keep up.

    Next up, we will see how the Time and Expense Entry experience of the agent works and how it can benefit you.

    Stay tuned!