Microsoft announced more than 25 Copilot finance skills and plugins

Microsoft announced more than 25 finance skills and partner-built plugins for Copilot on October 29, 2026. The announcement spans accounting, corporate finance and capital markets, but Microsoft assigned different access stages to the features: some were listed as generally available, accounting capabilities were in Frontier, and Dynamics 365 ERP and partner plugins were beginning rollout. Microsoft’s announcement sets out those distinctions.

Which Copilot finance features are generally available?

Microsoft’s October 29 announcement separates the features into three stages. Its table listed certain Finance skills and Cowork plugins as generally available, accounting capabilities in Frontier, and other plugins as beginning rollout.

Frontier is Microsoft’s early-access program. For teams considering a workflow, the practical distinction is that an announcement about the broader finance expansion does not put every capability in the same access stage. Microsoft also says some partner services may require separate licensing or subscriptions, authentication, or administrator enablement.

Microsoft named partner offerings across bookkeeping and financial management, company and risk intelligence, investment and wealth management, market research, and business banking. Its examples include Intuit QuickBooks, Xero, FactSet, LSEG and Mercury.

What Excel and Cowork are designed to do

In Copilot in Excel, Microsoft describes accounting skills for comparing balances and transactions, preparing reconciliation items for review, drafting journal entries and checking required inputs and balanced entries. The capabilities can also prepare performance reporting against a plan.

Cowork is aimed at work that spans multiple files and conversations. Microsoft says its Finance plugin can assemble close-review materials and forecast-review briefs, including variance commentary, blockers, risks and follow-up communications. The Capital Markets plugin is designed for workflows such as preparing investment cases and analyzing acquisition theses, with source inputs and analyst assumptions kept distinct for review.

Microsoft’s demonstration walks through quarterly close preparation, forecast updates, side-by-side checks of source data and generated work, and setup of recurring tasks that send reports by email. It also shows task progress in Cowork as the work proceeds.

What review and data controls does Microsoft describe?

For Excel, Microsoft describes an optional audit trail in chat history and workbook history tools that can summarize recent activity, identify who changed what and when, explain possible effects, and selectively reverse individual edits.

Microsoft says Copilot follows users’ existing permissions and sensitivity labels. It also says prompts, responses and documents are processed within the Microsoft 365 service boundary with enterprise data protection, and are not used to train underlying foundation models. Microsoft says finance professionals retain control of recommendations, decisions, approvals and actions.

During seven days of limited Insiders availability, Microsoft reported more than 8,000 unique users invoking accounting skills more than 44,000 times across more than 18,000 Copilot conversations.

How Microsoft describes Cowork billing

Microsoft classifies Copilot Cowork as usage-based and says advanced AI experiences use Copilot Credits. Its business pricing page also says everyday AI experiences are included with a license. Partner services may have separate licensing or subscription requirements.