Microsoft 365 Copilot isn't an accounting tool per se, but its impact on accounting practices is significant. If your practice runs on Microsoft 365 (and most do), Copilot adds an AI layer across every application you use daily.
The Excel capabilities are the headline for accountants. You can ask Copilot to analyse data in natural language ('show me all clients with turnover above £500k who haven't filed yet'), create formulas ('calculate the rolling 12-month average'), and generate charts and insights from raw data. For practices that do significant work in Excel, this genuinely transforms productivity.
In Outlook, Copilot can draft professional client emails from bullet points, summarise long email threads, and prioritise your inbox by importance. For practices that spend hours daily on email communication, the time savings are real.
The Teams integration is useful for client meetings — Copilot can generate meeting summaries, action items, and follow-up emails automatically. No more scribbling notes during calls and forgetting half of what was discussed.
Word integration helps with report writing, proposal drafting, and creating client-facing documents. You can feed it a brief and get a well-structured first draft that you then refine.
The downsides are the cost (£24.70/user/month on top of your existing Microsoft 365 subscription) and the fact that it's not accounting-specific. You won't get the deep domain knowledge of tools like Karbon or Silverfin. But as a productivity multiplier across your entire daily workflow, it's worth evaluating — especially if your practice is already heavily invested in the Microsoft ecosystem.