Business Central finance automation is creating a new implementation challenge for Microsoft Partners: deciding where financial work should be done, how much of it should be automated, and how to keep trusted accounting processes intact as AI enters the workflow.
That issue is becoming more visible as companies such as BILL build deeper connections between Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and the finance operations systems that sit around it. BILL’s integration with Business Central supports accounts payable, accounts receivable, spend and expense management, including two-way syncing across AP and AR, card transactions, reconciliation and custom accounting setups.
For Kyle Gehrman, senior product manager at BILL, the opportunity starts with customers who are still moving financial information through manual processes.
BILL’s focus, he said, is on accounts payable, accounts receivable, and spend solutions, aiming to address more of a customer’s cash flow needs while syncing information back to core systems.
The target customer is familiar to many Business Central Partners: a company still sending cheques, processing paper invoices, creating invoices manually, or chasing receivables by phone. Automation can remove work from those processes, but it also creates design questions that sit close to the Partner’s role.
Business Central finance automation raises trust questions
In finance, automation must be both fast and trustworthy. An AI-assisted workflow that sends a payment to the wrong vendor, uses the wrong amount, or codes a transaction incorrectly can create problems downstream in reporting, closing, and reconciliation.
BILL is already applying AI in this area. The company lists the BILL Invoice Coding Agent, which dynamically extracts and codes multi-line bills based on previous coding behaviour, and the BILL W-9 Agent, which emails vendors to collect and enter W-9s.
If invoice coding, vendor documentation and payment workflows become more automated, Partners still need to help customers define controls, exceptions, approvals, dimensions and system-of-record decisions.
Business Central may remain the financial system of record, while BILL handles payment and spend workflows around it. In other cases, customers may perform parts of the same process in both places.
That makes workflow design a services opportunity, especially for Partners already supporting finance teams through close, reporting and governance work, as PartnerTalks has covered in its reporting on Business Central finance transformation and reporting.
Partners shape the workflow
Gehrman was clear that BILL relies on Partners because Business Central implementations are rarely generic.
“With that complexity, it takes expertise,” he said.
That expertise includes accounting knowledge, technical knowledge and practical knowledge of how customers actually want to work. Some customers may prefer to manage a process in BILL. Others may want more of the process inside Business Central. Many will need both systems to exchange clean, correctly coded data.
Gehrman said BILL leans on Partners to understand customizations inside Business Central and how its tools work with everything else customers are trying to do in the ERP.
“Sometimes they have more control over the things we’re building than they realize,” he said.
Business Central finance automation, he said, does not remove the need for implementation expertise. Instead, it shifts that expertise toward process design, data quality, trust and exception handling.
For Partners, the opportunity is to decide how automation fits into the customer’s financial operating model before bad workflows become automated workflows.
