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.

This Agent is in Production Ready Preview right now and you should see it if you have updated your solution to version 4.140.0.239 or above. I am still exploring details of the Time and Expense Entry experience of the Agent and will share my thoughts on it soon, but I wanted to share my thoughts on the Approvals Experience of the agent today.

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 and tools (MCP server 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!