时间与费用录入：没人喜欢但对所有项目/服务型组织至关重要的任务——现在由 Dynamics 365 中的 AI 代理处理 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-ww12345678 的部落格

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.