Automation & AI: Evolving the Office of Finance

While daily headlines are dominated by mention of AI, there is much to understand about its application in business. We field calls almost daily from clients asking for concrete examples of how they can start applying AI to free their finance team from low-value tasks so they can focus on more strategic priorities.   

Watch this on-demand webinar for a practical look at AI – and automation – in the Office of Finance. We demo and discuss two Microsoft products that are reshaping corporate finance: Microsoft Power Automate (in use today) and Copilot for Finance (in preview). Using real-world use cases, we show how these tools can help elevate the strategic outlook for CFOs and the finance team.

  • Learn how to simplify repetitive tasks you already perform, such as automating receivable processing and account reconciliation. 
  • See real-world applications for automation that can be deployed today. 
Presenters

Keith Knowles 
Managing Director
Senturus, Inc. & Envisor

Pat Powers 
Data & Analytics Consultant & Trainer
Senturus, Inc.

Machine transcript

0:11
Hello everyone, welcome.

0:13
Welcome everyone to this this session of Senturus webinars.

0:19
Today we’re going to be talking about evolving the Office of Finance.

0:23
We’re going to be talking about Copilot for Finance and Power Automate.

0:29
It’s two great tools to help you evolve your office of finance.

0:35
Here’s what we’re going to be covering today.

0:38
We’re going to do a couple introductions because for once, I’m not doing this all alone.

0:42
I’ve got to introduce other people today.

0:45
That’s throwing me off, but it’s OK.

0:47
We’re going to do introductions.

0:48
We’re going to talk about the data-driven Office of Finance.

0:51
We’re going to talk about Copilot for Finance, Power Automate, going to do some demos and then we’ll wrap up with our usual, usual additional resources about Senturus and Q&A.

1:02
So First off, for those of you don’t know me, that’s me on the right.

1:07
I’m Pat Powers, Datand Analytics skeleton and trainer with Senturus.

1:11
Been doing this quite a long time.

1:13
I am certified in a number of datanalysis products, familiar with all of the different stacks.

1:20
And yet, you know, I that’s exactly what I look like there on the left.

1:26
On the left we’ve got Keith Knowles, our managing Director for Senturus and our advisor product line.

1:34
Keith, would you like to say a word or two about yourself?

1:37
Hey, thanks for the thanks for the warm welcome there, Pat.

1:39
And yeah, I’m excited to talk about this topic here today and so appreciate everybody joining us.

1:45
Should be great, great webinar and something that we’re all very passionate about here with Vincent Taurus.

1:51
Thank you, Keith.

1:52
So let’s do our first and only, I believe, Paul, for this one.

1:56
Hey, is your Office of Finance data-driven?

2:01
I’m giving you three choices, a straight up yes or no.

2:04
But then that important one, I’m not sure what that means, which is why you’re here, right?

2:10
OK, so I’m going to go ahead and launch the poll and I’m going to go ahead and let that run for about two minutes.

2:18
All right, there we go.

2:19
So let’s share these results.

2:23
So take a look at that gang.

2:26
54% of you are data-driven.

2:29
That’s awesome.

2:30
That is great.

2:32
And we can help you take that to the next step with automation and with AI.

2:38
For those of you not there, we can help you too.

2:41
And for those who said I’m not sure what that means, stick around, you’re going to learn.

2:46
All right, thank you all for your votes.

2:52
And from here, I’m going to hand this off to Keith.

2:56
Keith is going to go ahead and take over.

3:00
Thanks, Pat.

3:00
And that’s some really interesting results.

3:02
We’re going to share what we found from a survey that we’ve been leveraging as far as that number of companies that actually believe that they’re data-driven from the CFO perspective.

3:12
We’ll share that in a moment.

3:13
It’s quite a bit different than what we see here with the 54% saying yes.

3:17
But I do want to define that.

3:19
And it almost would be interesting if we took a poll after the fact.

3:22
We’re not going to do that, but it’d be interesting to see if anybody would change your position that.

3:25
But when we talk about data-driven Office of Finance or the data-driven CFO, which is part of the messaging we’re now using within Senturus, we’re talking about folks that that have made an investment in their Office of Finance to do a number of things.

3:40
And I’m going to kind of talk about this elevating their seat at the table to the last kind of part of this.

3:45
Because for the most part, if you think about it, of course, the Office of Finance is data-driven, right?

3:50
It’s kind of an oxymoron to said justice not.

3:52
But when you get in the nuances of it and we start talking about how exactly are they data-driven?

3:58
What we see from the folks that consider themselves in this, this upper echelon of data-driven, typically they democratize their datand their insights.

4:05
They’ve gotten the data out, they’re sharing it without the information.

4:07
They’re big on self-service.

4:09
They’ve invested in making sure that their processes are real time or near real time.

4:14
They’re not waiting on systems to close for four or five days before they actually provide numbers.

4:19
In a lot of cases, they’ve automated their labor intensive tasks and we’re going to auger in on that momentarily.

4:24
But I want to come back to this initial statement here elevates their seat at the table.

4:28
And maybe it’s even better stated as they own that seat at the table.

4:32
Because if you think about it, of course, the CFO in the Office of Finance does have a seat at the table.

4:37
It’s a rite of passage, so to speak.

4:39
They get to sit down and help aid decision making, but are they driving that decision making?

4:45
And I think we probably all have all worked at places where that office of finance is in places where it’s not.

4:51
And I’ll give you a couple examples.

4:53
So I cut my teeth out of out of grad school at Hewlett Packard, which was a, a data-driven finance organization at, if I’ve ever seen one.

5:01
And you got into a meeting with the finance team and you knew the position and they were doing analysis without working with the business or without the business driving it.

5:10
Maybe is a better way to say that they were always partnering with the business, but they were often looking at ways to improve things on their own without having to, to wait for somebody to ask.

5:19
Conversely, I’ve also worked with CFOs that when you’re sitting at the table with the CEO is barking orders at that CFO and they’re reacting.

5:30
And that’s the reality that we often see out there in the marketplace.

5:32
So if you could go to the build, we often see that the office of finance is typically more of a scenario of where the reacting requests for data that they haven’t democratized, they’re not sharing, that they haven’t invested in self-service.

5:48
They’re often waiting in on pins and needles for the, for the books to close.

5:53
And they typically have large Staffs that are doing repetitive data tasks.

5:58
In some case, maybe it’s not a large staff, it’s a smaller company that may have a small office of finance.

6:03
You may have a highly paid individual, highly skilled that’s spending a lot of time tracking items as opposed to having it automated.

6:10
So again, it would be really interesting to see if people change their opinion after looking at this.

6:15
But if you, if you go to the build here, what we found and this a survey that we’ve been leveraging that only 20% of survey of CFO surveyed actually claim that they’re data-driven.

6:25
So it’s really kind of interesting to see the numbers that we’ve had here so far.

6:28
So anyway, if we go to the next, next slide, we’ll dive into this a little bit.

6:33
So we at Centaurus have put together our point of view on how to become more data-driven and how to elevate your office of finance.

6:40
So you actually own that.

6:42
So you are considered a strategic partner with the business.

6:45
And for those of you that aren’t in finance that are sitting here through this, this presentation, we are going to talk about automating processes that can be done for almost anything that’s labor intensive.

6:56
So it’s not just going to be finance related, but a lot of examples will be.

6:59
But when we talk about what are the pillars of a data-driven office of finance, oof, office of finance, the things that that companies have invested in is again, the real time, the pillars, the real time so that they aren’t waiting for the close.

7:13
They aren’t doing a planning cycle annually or even quarterly.

7:16
They have more of a continuous planning cycle.

7:19
So they’re seeing data in time to react as opposed to after the fact, they’ve democratized their data, they’ve invested in, in, in self-service and that they’re being proactive with their information sharing and focusing more on strategic tasks as opposed to doing report requests that have come in.

7:37
And governance is a pillar of this as well.

7:38
It’s not so much something that you’re doing, it’s something you have to do and policy you have to have in place to make sure that you’re sharing your datappropriately.

7:47
There’s another part of that that’s also pretty important.

7:49
That’s what we call data literacies to ensure that as you’ve built out self-service capabilities, that revenue in department A means the same as it does in Department B that somebody’s not looking at bookings versus recognized revenue.

8:06
So, so it’s very important that you have the state of literacy across your organization and governance so that the right people are getting access to the data.

8:13
So that’s a key kind of a foundational thing.

8:16
Now lastly, where we’re going to drill in for the bulk of this this session is in automation and AI.

8:22
And we talked about this concept of replacing human robots with AI and RPARPA.

8:27
For those of you who may not have heard that term is robotics process automation.

8:31
Specifically the tooling we’re going to be talking about today is our Automate, which is a Microsoft RPA solution.

8:38
And that solution helps you automate labor intensive tasks.

8:42
And I really enjoy talking about this because every time I meet with people in the Office of Finance, I’m often the, the initial conversation starts out somewhat hesitant, somewhat.

8:53
Yeah, we’ve got somebody who monitors our contracts or our receivables inbox and they have to take the receivable, they validate it, make sure it’s actually somebody that’s legit.

9:03
Then they enter it into our system, they log it, so on and so forth.

9:06
And we talk about how you can automate that and explain that.

9:10
And next thing you know there, the conversation changes and the person’s excited and they’re saying, tell me more, what’s the name of that tool that does that?

9:17
How do you do that?

9:19
And so we’re going to dive into some of these examples here in a moment.

9:23
And the thing about this, is these projects to automate something like a receivables inbox, they’re not months long types of things.

9:31
They’re usually a couple of weeks or shorter than that, even if it’s a small company.

9:35
So we’ll auger into that in a moment.

9:36
So let’s go to the next slide, Pat.

9:40
And the interesting thing is McKenzie did an analysis.

9:42
This a couple years old now.

9:44
And you say, well, Keith, that’s dated, it’s a dated survey.

9:46
But the, aspect about that is this survey is in context of the technologies that were available a couple years ago.

9:53
So if you think about it today with today’s technologies that are just really exploding in this automation and AI focus, you can probably automate even more.

10:03
But regardless, these numbers are staggering.

10:05
The fact that you could automate fully 42% of your finance tasks that that’s pretty impressive, right?

10:12
And the initial 19% can be mostly automated.

10:15
The net result of this and since we are financing, I’m not going to do the ROI on it.

10:18
You can do this in your in your head for your own organization.

10:21
But typically organizations are seeing 35% savings in labor, if not more when they automate a process.

10:28
Not to mention the fact that they have now eliminated something that is very tactical and allowed a person, especially if it’s somebody that’s do it.

10:36
That’s, that’s doing a, a, a has a partly more strategic job and a tactical job.

10:41
You’ve eliminated that tactical aspect about that.

10:43
So let’s, move on here.

10:44
And I’m going to quickly get to Pat’s show here.

10:48
So something we’re going to, this kind of some context here.

10:50
So 5 targets and I and I’ve got this little mirror image here.

10:53
So we also started looking inside within our own office of finance and started automating some of this stuff.

10:58
And it’s just amazing the results.

11:01
And again, Pat’s going to dive into this.

11:03
So here are some real practical pragmatic things that you can do and look at it from a contracts administration, any of this manual today is worth a look at.

11:13
And so we’re going to give some examples of this.

11:15
I have one more slide here that we’re just going to show momentarily and this will be in the download that you can use.

11:20
These are some of the typical things in the Office of Finance that are that are can be automated fully in most cases.

11:26
So with that said, I’m going to turn this over to Pat and she’s going to take us through the really exciting part of this and give some real life types of examples of what you can do to automate your processes.

11:39
Thank you, Keith, I am back.

11:41
Welcome back everybody.

11:42
And you know, I just want to take a quick, hopefully you’re as excited as I am, Pat.

11:47
Well, you know, I was about to say that I hope that everybody on here today really does hear Keith’s excitement.

11:55
OK, you know, you all know how hard it is to get finance people excited about anything.

12:00
All right, So just hearing that excitement and Keith’s voice, I mean, I get excited when the cat walks by me.

12:08
I’m pretty easy to excite.

12:10
But for real, honestly, this an exciting thing because we do, we get stuck in the muck with all of these day-to-day basic tasks and there are tools at your disposal that are right there.

12:27
We can save thousands of man hours.

12:30
You know, we have one client in particular where we showed them how to go from eight people closing their books at the end of every month, taking an entire week to do it down to a single person closing the books at the end of the month and doing it in one day or less.

12:50
That that is a tangible ROI on investing in these types of technology folks.

12:57
These are absolutely tangible.

12:59
So I’m going to start.

13:01
So again, thank you, Keith.

13:02
And also I want to point out we have AK Knowles with us as well today.

13:08
And if any of you want to talk about any of this further, you can get on to Kay’s calendar and she will be happy to schedule a brief meeting with you to just talk about your needs and how we can take care of things for you.

13:22
And Kay.

13:23
When you get a moment, if you wouldn’t mind putting your calendar link right in the chat window for everybody, we’d appreciate that.

13:29
Perfect.

13:29
Thank you very much.

13:31
Like I say, we can get you on Kay’s calendar and talk more and you can talk with me or talk with Keith or talk with Kay.

13:38
Hey, so let’s start with talking about copilot finance now.

13:41
copilot for finance here.

13:43
We’re getting into that true AI.

13:45
All right, This an extension of Copilot.

13:49
And unless you’ve been living under a rock lately, I mean, let’s be honest, you’ve heard of Copilot.

13:56
More than likely if you’re in this kind of a meeting, if you have this kind of experience, you’ve heard of Copilot.

14:03
As a matter of fact, Microsoft is investing heavily into Copilot at the CES.

14:07
This year at CES show, I think it was January, Microsoft unveiled keyboards that have a Copilot key built in.

14:17
OK, there’s a Copilot key built in.

14:21
So we all had to get used to that Windows key however many decades ago now.

14:26
Now you’re going to have to get used to a Copilot key on your keyboard.

14:29
But that’s how serious and integrated this stuff should be in everything that you’re doing, whether it’s Copilot for Fabric, whether it’s Copilot for Power BI, or Copilot for finance.

14:42
OK, this going to become part of how you start understanding the world and Copilot.

14:49
Come on, mouse.

14:51
Don’t you hate when your mouse moves?

14:52
There it is.

14:54
copilot is for everything.

14:57
It’s for reporting, it’s for sales, it’s for forecasting, it’s for finance.

15:04
OK, we are going to see this today.

15:08
We’re going to see how it integrates to these things.

15:12
Right out of the gate, though, it’s going to integrate with tools you already know.

15:18
And, and that is so important.

15:21
We’re not asking you to learn something new.

15:24
We’re asking you to use the tools, your groups and your employees and your analysts, things they’re already familiar with.

15:34
We’re not taking away their beloved Excel.

15:38
And I know that hits home with a lot of you.

15:40
We’re not taking away Excel, I promise.

15:44
But what we’re going to do is show you how to use those tools so you can get better insights, you can get better work flows, and start looking at things that are relative to your financial operations.

15:58
Stop dealing in the muck, OK?

16:02
Stop dealing with the muck.

16:04
Stop spending time with human robots doing automated automatable repeated tasks, plain and simple.

16:14
Let’s take a look right there, because I know I’ve been doing this a long, long time longer than some of you have been alive.

16:20
I know that trying to get excel away from people is gosh darn near impossible.

16:26
But look at some of these things with Copilot and with Power Automate, automated comparisons, simplification of reconciliation, sending it through Outlook and through your Dynamics 365 South.

16:40
This way it’s integrated all the way across the board using conversational prompts.

16:47
You don’t have to try and teach employees a new language or a new tool.

16:53
They literally can type in there.

16:55
Show me my budget for last quarter.

17:00
OK, that that it doesn’t get any simpler than that gang.

17:05
And that of course can be turned into visuals and those visuals can work in outlook in teams.

17:11
So we’re not trying to sell you on a single solution.

17:15
We’re trying to tell you, hey, this goes across the board.

17:19
And from there, from there you can really drive your Financial Group because once you start getting some of those under your belt, now you can start using different things like what if scenarios.

17:34
You can produce financial models.

17:37
Think of how many times if you could have run a few test scenarios beforehand, how much better and simpler things would have been.

17:51
OK, you can run multiple what ifs.

17:53
You can set up variables.

17:56
Of course, we can never account for everything, but wouldn’t it be nice to at least have tried?

18:03
And it’s going to show you what’s going on behind the scenes.

18:06
It’s not going to be black box.

18:09
It’s going to let you explain so that you can turn around, integrate it with Outlook, manage your workflows, send updates directly in e-mail, and even have document approval.

18:23
When we get into the Power Automate demos.

18:25
One of the demos I want to show you today is document approval.

18:30
So you can actually build a business friendly scenario that if somebody adds something to SharePoint, it looks it finds that e-mail or finds that SharePoint file, sends it off an e-mail, we can set it up for approval and update people.

18:50
Now remember, and here’s something where you know where we can help you, it’s only ever going to be as good as your data.

18:59
No matter what the tool is, it’s only ever going to be as good as your source data, OK.

19:07
And this, this may be the first and biggest hurdle you need to get over to, to move forward.

19:13
And that’s where you call Centaurus.

19:15
And we can help you with that.

19:17
We’re not just specialists in finance and things like that.

19:19
We can help you build data warehouses and get your data ready so that we can move forward, so that we can evolve your office of Finance.

19:31
Then use this for strategic decision making.

19:36
Thisn’t just, oh, this pretty, this nice.

19:39
No, if you’re truly a data-driven finance group, if you’re truly evolving your office, you’re using this to make decisions.

19:47
And as Keith mentioned already, with things like governance, you’ve got to make sure you’ve got the right folks in place, the right rules in place and you’re complying with all, all financial data rules.

20:01
OK, so that’s an introduction to Copilot.

20:04
Hopefully everybody is doing OK on that.

20:08
There was a question.

20:10
Just again, if you have questions, please make sure you put them in the Q&A panel right now.

20:15
You can also send to the chat window, but the chat window we don’t keep as close tracked of during these.

20:22
But there was a messages came through that came through about what fabric for Copilot, normal Copilot, things like that.

20:27
We do have a Copilot webinar up on Senturus.com and Resource where we do talk about what Copilot is and how it integrates with Fabric and things like that.

20:38
OK, so if you want to check that out on our website, Senturus.com/resources.

20:45
So let’s talk about the second tool.

20:47
And hopefully everybody’s doing good.

20:48
Hopefully I haven’t bored anybody to death yet.

20:51
Hopefully you’re still sitting on the edge of your seat excited.

20:54
Andrew, are you excited?

20:56
I can always count on Andrew to be excited.

21:00
Let’s talk about power automate.

21:02
See, there we go, Power Automate.

21:06
Here’s that RPA.

21:09
What we’re going to do here is we’re going to get you out of the muck.

21:12
We’re going to get you out of those day-to-day tasks.

21:16
We’re going to stop you from being reactive because it’s going to automate those business processes, all those things that you’ve done manually for 11 billion years, moving data between two systems, local tasks.

21:32
Look at some of these examples over here that are generated by copilot within power Automate every month, copy all files from OneDrive to another OneDrive.

21:42
When a new item is created in SharePoint, send me an e-mail.

21:46
OK, Think about think about how many hours you and your Co workers and your staff spend per month manually doing tasks like that.

22:02
It’s all about automation.

22:04
We let’s get these manual tasks off of your plate.

22:08
It uses a very simple, straightforward interface.

22:11
OK, it’s a low code interface, a lot of drag and drop.

22:15
The product has evolved quite a bit over the years.

22:17
There are a number of customer stories on Microsoft’s website and they are set for different industries, including finance.

22:26
Now, while you don’t need to be a developer, there are some things where you can actually code in there.

22:34
All of the tasks that we create in Power Automate can be viewed and edited from a Jason perspective.

22:43
OK, now hopefully I haven’t scared any of you by showing you the Jason code, but this for the fancy people out there.

22:51
I know there’s some of you who are fancy and you want to be able to type things in.

22:55
You know you’re the same people who always want to write sequel and reports.

23:01
But for the rest of us, for the rest of us who like clicking and dragging and dropping, we can start with a template.

23:09
Numerous.

23:11
And that is the understatement of the day.

23:14
Numerous templates are available in there to get you started and they are updated on a regular basis.

23:22
When you start to use this tool, you’ll see there’s V2V 3V4.

23:27
This this not going away.

23:31
This not something that’s going to be pushed to the side.

23:35
OK, So there’s plenty of things to get you started as well as training from us, so we can get you started in this.

23:43
And you can use templates.

23:45
There’s also a tool there known as AI Builder.

23:47
So again, we’re bringing in this concept of AIAI Builder allows you to have all different types of models.

23:54
We can do some model inference with upstream actions, for example, e-mail, SharePoint files, Dataverse tables, and send it downstream, put it into Teams, send it, put it back to the Dataverse.

24:09
So there are all these things you can do with the AI Builder and some specific use cases, just like what Keith was saying.

24:18
I don’t have an entire page to show you.

24:21
I just want to focus on these three here because a lot of these are important to you guys.

24:27
Invoice processing where the AI Builder can pull out the relevant columns and transfer it off to your data warehouse.

24:36
Dematerialize documents with the built in text recognition model, so this can take all those PDF forms that you’ve scanned in and scanned in, scanned in and put those into a central system.

24:51
Again, putting this into your data warehouse so you can build reports and so that you can truly be data-driven.

24:59
Then there’s this one nice little tricky one here, and if there’s time allowing, I actually have a demo for this one where you can filter by language.

25:08
If you deal with international, even if you are, even if it’s just a simple hey, I’m in Canada or I’m in Mexico and I deal in the US, etcetera.

25:20
You can actually use the AI builder to have it look at the document, detect the language automatically and route it off to the right person.

25:32
And I would wager at least one of you who’s on here today has a human doing that right now, OK.

25:40
Or you have a convoluted process for doing that.

25:43
And this a very simple built in flow.

25:47
One of the first things I want to show you when we get to the demos is the process advisor.

25:52
The process advisor is probably going to be the first step for most of you because with this, we can do process mining.

26:01
And this allows us to have a visual process map of everything that we do.

26:08
All of our tasks can be recorded, we can track the completion times, and we can map every single step.

26:17
That is a huge one.

26:20
Because I’ll tell you right now, if somebody were to ask you, hey, how do you make this dish that we had?

26:27
You’ll, if you’ve made it a million times, you’re going to ramble off the primary steps, but you’re going to forget those one or two little steps.

26:37
We recently worked on doing an automation ourselves.

26:42
We’re doing automation ourselves within Senturus.

26:45
And before we tackled it, we had the person who was handing it off document their steps.

26:52
And during that process we found multiple steps.

26:55
Oh yeah, I forget.

26:56
I also do this.

26:57
Oh yeah, I forgot.

26:58
I have to do this too.

27:00
So by using the process advisor, you can record it.

27:06
You can record every single step.

27:09
Tell me that’s cool.

27:10
You know, that’s cool, gang.

27:13
All right, at least one of you just perked up and got excited.

27:16
Chelsea got excited about that.

27:19
All right, I got you all here.

27:22
We can monitor these, we can troubleshoot them.

27:26
We can use the Centre of Excellence, Power BI dashboard so we can monitor power apps power automate all of that is available from Microsoft.

27:37
We can help you set up the Coe as well and with that here comes the part you really came it’s demo time.

27:45
I know why you really came right.

27:53
You didn’t just come talk to me Keith.

27:55
Do you have something to add there?

27:57
I do actually, I just something I didn’t really stress in the beginning here and it just became apparent as you’re talking through this fact is, is really what we’re trying to show here is, is somewhat of the art of the possibility, right?

28:09
So, all of these things may be tailored that we’re showing you or a specific use case, but hopefully you’re seeing or will see momentarily ways that you can apply this.

28:18
It may not be invoice processing as an example, but you’ll see ways that you can automate tasks that you have.

28:25
And again I’ll just reiterate, whenever I have these conversations with folks, often times they start off with, I don’t have anything that you can automate.

28:33
And the next thing you know, we have a list of half a dozen, a dozen things in, in the, in the conversation and the people get excited.

28:39
So hopefully you’re going to leave this section thinking about the art of the possibility and how you can re factor and reimagine some of these manual tasks that you have and hopefully gets some of your folks out of the mock.

28:51
As Pat’s been saying, the mock, the infamous muck.

28:56
No, nobody wants to be in the muck, right?

29:00
Thank you, Keith.

29:01
So let’s start this.

29:04
Here we are.

29:05
I’m going to start by showing power automate.

29:08
OK, I really want to start this.

29:10
And you can see here, right there on the page, we’re talking about that Discover RPA with zero infrastructure.

29:18
You can actually host your RPA and run this at scale.

29:24
So this can be done all sorts of different levels, but I want to show this process mining.

29:30
I want to start off with the process mining.

29:35
We use this to optimate our business process.

29:38
And you can see I’ve got a few going right now.

29:40
I’ve got accounts receivable, I’ve got accounts payable, I’ve got my test process because of course I had to start it.

29:51
But take a look at some of the sample processes, material movement, finance processes, SAP accounts payable procedure to pay things that hit your world.

30:04
And then of course there’s some samples and there’s some learning going on.

30:09
Now, of course, again, you need licenses for all this and we can help you with that.

30:15
You can see that my limited capacity license, I’m going to get rid of that.

30:19
We don’t need to know that mine expires soon.

30:24
I pre ran one because these do take a few minutes.

30:27
So I pre ran a process.

30:30
This a sample accounts receivable process.

30:33
And what it’s done is it’s gone out there and it’s looked for data and I’ve left this up.

30:39
There’s Copilot.

30:41
There is Copilot integrated into Power Automate, right?

30:48
Siddhakar?

30:49
That’s a perfect question to ask Kay about the licenses that are needed for these things to and what the cost is on those licenses.

30:57
I would strongly suggest getting on Kay’s calendar to talk through those needs.

31:02
I don’t want to get into licensing costs here because it could be specific to your environment and things like that.

31:11
So here we see copilot is built in.

31:14
copilot is right here.

31:16
Our summary tab shows us a process map and look at this, finance managers can identify bottlenecks using the performance view.

31:26
Come on, that’s cool.

31:28
We can refresh this when data gets changed, when data gets added.

31:33
And lastly, we have a details page which shows us our Power BI workspaces, our data source settings.

31:40
So remember, this all integrated.

31:42
So let’s take a look at one of these.

31:45
Let’s go in.

31:46
Come on, you know there’s nothing like doing these things real time gang and you know, having them go in.

31:54
So if when we click on performance, I wanted you to drill into that.

31:58
Let me see if I can get it to go a little closer.

32:02
Hello, here we go.

32:06
So let’s take a look at this.

32:08
So here we see the process, we see the recorded process from invoice entry to credit memo entry, whether or not we approve or reject an invoice, whether we fill it.

32:23
We’ve got the entire process mapped out.

32:26
So somebody recorded their steps and they went ahead.

32:31
And now what we can do is we can highlight our performance.

32:35
Any place where something’s going on, we can see any particular issues.

32:41
We can look at it by total duration, our mean duration, our min and Max.

32:47
This your entire process in one simple to see set up.

32:55
OK, and we’ve got a general and we can go down to the actual invoice analysis.

33:02
So look at this.

33:03
We’ve got a dashboard that shows us our entire process.

33:08
How cool is this gang?

33:11
And then we leverage copilot.

33:14
We say, hey, provide me the top insights and it’s going to go over here and it’s going to look at all of this.

33:21
Now, this was all generated by recording the process steps, by recording everything that got done during one of these.

33:31
OK, so here it is again.

33:34
You can read it a little better.

33:37
You can see every step of the way, every step of the way, how long it took, how many there were, there was 48 rejected invoices, 101 refunds, and we can go down to that detail.

33:54
We can follow that whole path.

33:56
Come on, this cool.

33:58
So this over here we see the top insights.

34:01
So over here we see that that was 43 days, 3 hours, 31 minutes and 10 seconds, what the median case duration was.

34:11
All right, again, hopefully, hopefully at least one of you is on the edge of your seat now with excitement because I can continue to use copilot.

34:23
I can continue to use copilot to drill down into my business process.

34:28
The activity complete, the customer complete the customer memo has the highest rework percentage.

34:35
Look at that.

34:35
Andrew just fell off his seat, ladies and gentlemen, he was so excited he fell off his seat.

34:43
So we’re at 2:40 and I want to make sure there’s enough time.

34:46
So this the process mining aspect of it, and I hope you can see that there’s a lot going on here and there are a lot of processes available.

34:56
One other thing before I leave this one thing that’s also cool.

35:00
Remember how I said this all integrated?

35:04
Once I started my mining process, I got this great e-mail and this could have also gone to Teams if I wanted it.

35:14
So I can kick these processes off.

35:17
I don’t have to babysit them, which is huge, right?

35:22
I don’t have to sit here and babysit the process and I’ll get my e-mail notification when it’s ready to go and I’ll be able to view my process report.

35:32
It’s there and ready for me.

35:36
OK, so let’s talk more about Power Automate.

35:40
Let’s talk about some of the things we can do.

35:45
Now real quick, while I’m showing these things to you, Power Automate does come in two flavours, cherry and vanilla.

35:53
No, wait, we have the online version and we do have a desktop version, so you can actually work offline with this.

36:03
If you have the desktop version, you can install power automated for desktop.

36:10
And just another thing along those same lines.

36:13
I mentioned earlier how Microsoft is investing heavily into Copilot with keyboards and stuff.

36:18
There is a build of Windows 11 coming out soon.

36:21
Let build 1142.

36:23
Cortana has been completely stripped out of it and it will now have Copilot built in.

36:29
All right, so when we say that there’s full integration, Copilot will be built into Windows 11 as a build 1142.

36:40
And when you have things like power Automate for desktop, you can automate your desktop flows.

36:44
So everything that you’re doing in Excel locally on your desktop can be automated.

36:53
So you can see I’ve got quite a number of flows going right now, got quite a number of flows that, you know, some might put built a while back for exactly this reason.

37:04
But there’s things like blocking out my calendar, sending a work from home e-mail.

37:09
Don’t we all work from home these days.

37:12
Oh, wait.

37:13
But what’s of importance to you?

37:16
Things like creating a document approval flow.

37:19
All right, so right here, document approval.

37:24
There it is down the bottom.

37:27
Let’s take a look at this flow.

37:31
Oops.

37:34
And it might flow.

37:37
It’s that’s it gang.

37:39
That’s it.

37:41
It is not extremely excited.

37:43
You know why?

37:44
Because these things are all built in.

37:47
These things are all built in and part of the tool.

37:51
Now on my end, I had to create a SharePoint library.

37:55
OK, so there does have to be a library set up in SharePoint that needs to be ready for this.

38:01
So you can see here in my SharePoint I’ve got a flows directory, I’ve got things already set up and processed.

38:10
I’ve got an approvals library with a rejected documents.

38:15
And what this does is it checks when a file comes in, where does it go?

38:21
How often am I checking?

38:22
I’m checking every minute and then we’re going to wait for an approval.

38:27
It’s going to get assigned to someone.

38:29
Now I’m assigning this obviously to me directly because I’m building it myself, but I could sign that to an AD group.

38:36
I could sign that to an entire group of people.

38:39
I can make sure it has an attachment.

38:42
I want to enable notifications and I can allow for reassignment If it’s true, I can do all sorts of things.

38:50
I can add an action.

38:51
Let me minimize that.

38:52
I can add an action.

38:54
And here’s where we see all of these different templates.

38:58
And if I want to say send e-mail, look at that send an e-mail notification V3 OK, did I did I miss a miss a question there, Kay?

39:15
I apologize if I did.

39:20
There is a way to host the RPAs.

39:22
Absolutely, and we can talk more about that.

39:25
Kay, we can get on Kay’s calendar and talk more about that.

39:29
I’m sorry if I missed something, I do try my best, but we can send an e-mail notification so I can add this in.

39:36
I just have to say who it’s going to.

39:41
Straightforward OOP, I can build myself a body and then there’s also advanced parameters if I want a carbon copy, somebody, if I want to BCC somebody, if I want to add an attachment.

40:11
So there’s all these sorts of things that can be added to it.

40:15
Hey, if I can jump in here for a moment, Pat, I just want to contrast, contrast what you’re showing right now with the with the copilot.

40:25
Activities you’re showing a few minutes back, right?

40:27
So you were really showing and talking about Copilot for finance in that section.

40:32
And Copilot for finance, if you think about it, it’s really targeted more the individual user and some of the stuff Pat’s showing right now can be done in Copilot for Finance.

40:41
However, it’s not really done in what would be something you’d roll out across your organization or an enterprise.

40:48
This RPA Power Automate is really aimed at something that’s department level, enterprise grade type of security associated with it.

40:56
You’re still going to have the security with the, with the Excel, but or, or I’m sorry, with the copilot for finance, but it’s really not going to be as easy to administer and manage at a group level or at a higher level.

41:09
This designed to, to do that.

41:12
So again, there’s some overlap here, but if you’re building something for department, its power automate is really what you want to be looking at.

41:18
So what Pat is showing now?

41:20
Absolutely.

41:21
Thank you Keith.

41:21
And again just to reiterate Keith’s point, you see copilot is here, copilot is here.

41:29
The two products are very tightly integrated.

41:31
But Keith is absolutely right.

41:33
What I’m setting up here, what I’m setting up here is an enterprise wide thing.

41:40
So as I just mentioned, I could set the e-mail addresses for approvals to be a group, to be an AD group, so not an individual necessarily.

41:48
This an enterprise thing.

41:50
And if the condition is false, we go ahead and we and we move the file off to our rejection.

41:58
So this a quick one I wanted to show you here and I could go ahead and I could do this one and then other things along the same lines and keeping these specific to the finance group, keeping these to the finance group, we can send emails directly to customers.

42:15
So when something comes in, if an invoice is paid, if an invoice is late, if an invoice has has a certain flag, I can read from an Excel file.

42:27
Look at this, I can read from an Excel file sitting out on my OneDrive and I can turn around and I can send an e-mail based on this.

42:36
So we could add an action that says, hey, if the invoice is 90 days late, send an e-mail again, another one of those tasks that’s probably done by a human today, something that is probably done by somebody in your finance group manually.

42:56
And all we got to do is use these types of tools to send these things out automatically.

43:02
Now there was a question of showing how Copilot will build a flow starting and ending.

43:07
So I can go ahead and you know what, I’m going to go ahead and deviate a little bit here.

43:11
So if I go to my flows and I create a new flow and let’s just say I want to look at something for invoices.

43:29
Now you also see that in addition to the Microsoft templates, there are other templates I’m going to go.

43:34
I want to keep with the Microsoft ones just for today so I can use Copilot over here.

43:42
I have to start it off by telling it what I wanted to do, but then I can say create a flow to check for e-mail and if it has an invoice, send to finance and Copilot will go ahead and it tells me exactly what actions to add.

44:10
And now I’m not.

44:13
This always part of it.

44:14
You do need to be signed in here.

44:16
So give me one second, please.

44:18
I am kind of going off my scripted demo, which you all know I am want to do sometimes.

44:29
Oh, that’s weird.

44:32
It’s not letting me sign in, but that’s weird.

44:35
But I would go ahead and I can add these things.

44:39
I can add these, set these connections up, and it will tell me exactly what I need to set up and I can skip that.

44:46
I can see if I want something different added these actions.

44:53
So that’s basically what it’s going to do.

44:55
It’s not going to necessarily build the flow from start to finish.

44:58
It’s going to tell me what actions I should add to it and it’s going to tell me, hey, you need to set this up.

45:05
OK.

45:07
So hopefully that answers the question that was asked 249.

45:12
I want to show one more than I want to show the copilot for finance portion of this.

45:19
So that way you get to see it.

45:21
And I do want to show that AI builder one.

45:23
So this routing emails based on AI building and this, this one’s pretty heavy duty.

45:30
So this shows you, hey, there’s a lot of pieces to the puzzle here.

45:36
So we’re going to get a new e-mail in.

45:40
We’re going to convert it to plain text by using the body dynamic.

45:44
Then we’re going to call the AI builder.

45:47
Once the AI builder goes, it does a language detection.

45:52
And if it’s English, it’s going to route it to a specific mailbox.

45:56
If it’s French, it’s going to route it to a different mailbox.

45:59
And if it’s none of the above, we’ve got yet another inbox to route it to.

46:05
And it’s going to do all of this automatically.

46:08
It’s going to take care of all of this on its own.

46:12
Things that can have, you know, I was working on something the other night.

46:15
Now I’m in the Eastern Time zone and I got an e-mail for something that came during a Pacific Time zone, and I didn’t see that till the next morning.

46:26
How many times does something come through finance where you need to reconcile something or get back to somebody, but they’re in a different time zone?

46:34
Processes like these can run automatically.

46:39
They can be set up so they’re running 24/7 and things get routed real time to the right time zone, to the right person, to the right situation.

46:52
OK, so last thing I do want to show here, we got about 6 minutes left, 7 minutes left.

46:58
Here’s everybody’s favourite tool.

47:01
Some of you just did a big sigh of relief.

47:04
You’re like, oh, thank goodness my baby.

47:09
Hey, and notice right up here at the top there is my integration of copilot for finance.

47:16
Now the reason I saved it for last, it is in preview.

47:20
It is not as robust yet as I would like.

47:25
There are only a couple things that are available right now, but I want you to see it so you understand the potential.

47:32
And when I do this, oh, oh, wait, are you telling me they updated today just for me?

47:40
No, that that would have been great, right?

47:42
Keith, wouldn’t that been super check in every day, right.

47:48
So the things that are available right now are reconciliation of data.

47:52
The analyze variances is coming soon.

47:56
So I want to show you this reconciliation of data and I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to use their sample data.

48:01
And what they give us in the sample data is a trip budget and a bank statement.

48:09
So here’s my budget, here’s my actuals and I can tell it, hey, reconcile these and I just have to OK, which two worksheets?

48:19
What’s the table name?

48:23
And now it’s going to ask me what are the common fields between these?

48:26
You got to have common fields, OK, You got to have common fields between all these things.

48:32
And here it’s date, category and budget amount.

48:36
And I can adjust this.

48:37
I can pick my own if I want.

48:40
But look at this nice report it just produced.

48:43
You tell me right now that there’s a single individual in your finance group that can build a reconciliation report that quickly.

48:50
OK, because I, I want them.

48:54
The real value is over here on the right.

48:57
The real value are these transactions.

49:01
The real value is what it’s telling us what it found.

49:07
Hey, there were 13 transactions that were perfectly matched.

49:10
There were four potential maxes.

49:13
There were 14 that had discrepancies.

49:16
And you can save this as APDF and oh, look, Copilot for Outlook Finance for Copilot for Outlook, I can send those results right there in my e-mail send.

49:32
I can also tie this to my Dynamics 365S.

49:36
Everything gets updated.

49:39
And the best part, cool part is I can troubleshoot a transaction.

49:42
I can say, hey, you know what, help me out here.

49:45
What’s going on with this cell?

49:47
What’s going on with this one?

49:49
And it’s going to go ahead and it’s going to say, hey, this was identified as miscellaneous.

49:53
It was a budget amount, but in the bank statement.

49:56
Now here’s something that might be interesting.

49:58
The currency of the bank statement table is CAD, but the budget table was USD.

50:05
This may be causing some of your unmatched transactions.

50:10
What?

50:12
Look at that.

50:14
That was exciting and you know it, that was pretty gosh darn cool.

50:19
But we can use this to figure things out.

50:23
We can say, oh, look at this, it’s a category difference, but we can troubleshoot our transactions, we can troubleshoot everything.

50:30
We can save it, and this only going to get more robust as time goes on.

50:38
All right, That’s what I have to show you today in there.

50:42
Let’s just summarize this all up.

50:45
Hey, you start integrating tools like copilot for finance.

50:48
You start really becoming a data-driven finance group.

50:53
You evolve, you’re going to get an increased productivity.

50:57
You really are that’s it’s a tangible ROI.

51:01
You’re also going to be able to start making better decisions because you’re going to have real time data analysis, you’re going to have predictive analysis.

51:07
You’re going to be able to do those what ifs.

51:09
It’s going to integrate with everything you already use.

51:13
No learning new tools, no having to figure these things out, no retraining, in some cases minimal.

51:19
If anything, we’re also going to reduce human error.

51:24
I would love to see a poll that shows what the human error cost is every month.

51:30
Hey, that’s a big one and it’s fully customizable to your needs.

51:37
When you’re ready to move through this, you want to plan this out.

51:40
You want to start recording your processes.

51:42
You want to figure out what’s going to benefit, what’s your low hanging fruit?

51:46
We’re going to get the power automate and copilot apps installed and then you’re going to go from there.

51:52
All right, now before I get into the regular Senturus stuff, Keith, is there anything else you’d like to add in one minute, one minute, one minute?

52:01
Yeah, I just hope that everybody here saw some of the power of these new tools and how easy they are to deploy.

52:07
Doesn’t mean you need to do them yourself, but they are quick and easy to deploy.

52:13
So even using help, you can do some of these projects and get a really high ROI on these things.

52:18
Pat talked about the human error side of it.

52:20
There’s also just finding folks to do the work today is such a challenge.

52:25
So if you have places that that are manual tasks and you’re challenged with keeping or retaining folks to do that work, you really should look at automating and refactoring that work.

52:37
You can eliminate a lot of cases.

52:39
So I’m just going to leave you with that and I’ll let you carry at home.

52:42
Pat.

52:43
OK, so thank you all for coming.

52:45
Let’s talk about upcoming events and resources.

52:47
Don’t leave quite yet because you’re going to want to hear this.

52:51
June 26th, we’re going to be doing an open Q&A session with Microsoft Power Automate.

52:57
I will be hosting an open free.

52:59
I know some of you out there that love that word because this a finance group after all.

53:04
Free Q&A session June 26th, 2:00 PM Eastern, 11:00 AM Pacific.

53:13
It’s an open Q&A.

53:14
We’re going to go through different examples.

53:16
I’m going to go more into depth on some of the things I showed you today.

53:19
I’m going to build some of those from scratch for you so you can see the whole process.

53:24
Siddhakar, if you were to come, we can actually work more with copilot during that session.

53:29
So please invite your friends, invite everybody else in your team.

53:32
We’re going to actually do hands on June 26th in Power Automate.

53:37
We’re going to have more time.

53:39
There’s it’s scheduled for an hour, but it can go longer if need be on July 18th, those of you still using Cognos, you’re out there.

53:47
We know you how to drop it into Power BI or Tableau.

53:52
Are you ready for all this?

53:54
If you’re not sure, please read our blog on the Senturus website.

53:58
We’ve got a new one out there for is your culture ready for AI?

54:02
Five factors for securing adoption and cultural change.

54:04
And then of course, there’s plenty at our knowledge center all the time on these things.

54:10
You can find things like insider viewpoints, unbiased reviews, tips, tricks, demos.

54:15
We’re awesome and you know it.

54:18
We’ve shared our BI expertise for decades.

54:20
Go to Senturus.com/resources At Senturus, we provide a full spectrum of analytics services and enablement.

54:28
We particularly shine in hybrid BI environments.

54:32
For those of you who are coming into this new and you’re looking and you’ve got Cognos, you’ve got Tableau, you’ve got other tools, we can help you figure out how to put all these pieces of the puzzle together, no matter how big or small.

54:43
We’ve got the knowledge, we’ve got the flexibility, We’ll help you get it done right.

54:48
Even if you just need training, governance, AI, we’re there for you.

54:55
Been doing this for 23 years.

54:57
We have 1400 clients.

54:59
We’ve done over 3000 projects.

55:01
Some of you on this list are in attendance today and we thank you for coming to that.

55:07
If there was any additional questions, please reach out to us at [email protected] or get on Kay’s calendar K1 last time if you’re still there to put your calendar link.

55:17
This a big topic, gang.

55:20
I will be also sending Kay’s calendar link at the 26th, but we want you to be able to get on calendar.

55:27
We want you to be able to talk more to us.

55:30
And with that, 3:00 on the dot.

55:33
Thank you all very much.

55:35
This recording will be available on the website.

55:39
Let’s keep in touch.

55:40
Message us.

55:42
Thank you all very much for coming today.

55:44
We hope you enjoyed this and we hope you learned something new.

55:47
Take care, everybody.

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