Expense management is one of those jobs that quietly eats time. Receipts go missing, claims get keyed in by hand, and finance spends the end of every month chasing approvals. If that sounds familiar, Microsoft's latest addition to Dynamics 365 Business Central is worth a look.
Expense Agent, part of the Business Central 2026 Release Wave 1, uses AI to run the whole expense process - from receipt capture through to approval and posting. For teams still wrangling expenses across spreadsheets, paper forms and email trails, it's a far more joined-up way to work.
What is Expense Agent?
Expense Agent is an AI-powered expense feature built directly into Business Central. It takes on the most tedious parts of the job: reading receipt information, categorising expenses, checking claims against your policies, and flagging possible duplicates. Employees get a simpler way to submit; your finance team gets better visibility and tighter control.
Who can use it?
Here's the part that makes it genuinely useful across the business: the people submitting expenses don't need a Business Central licence. So your field engineers, drivers, sales teams, project teams and anyone who travels for work can claim without ever logging into the finance system.
They can submit receipts through a dedicated web app or simply email them to a configured mailbox - familiar channels, no new system to learn.
How does the process work?
It's deliberately straightforward:
- Submit - an employee sends a receipt: a photo, PDF or digital receipt.
- Extract - Expense Agent reads the key details automatically: supplier, date, amount and expense information.
- Review - the employee checks the details, corrects anything that needs it, and confirms.
- Validate - the agent checks the claim against your policies and groups expenses into reports for approval.
- Approve and post - approvers and finance review the reports in Business Central, then post directly.
- No re-keying, and a clear audit trail from start to finish.
What it actually does
Under the hood, Expense Agent brings together:
- Receipt capture and AI data extraction
- Automatic expense categorisation
- Duplicate-submission flagging
- Policy validation
- Expense report creation
- Mileage and allowance support
- Detailed expense coding and reporting
- Approval workflow support
- Integration with your wider Business Central finance processes
The difference it makes
For your employees, claiming an expense stops being a chore - snap a receipt, check it, done. For approvers, every report arrives already checked against policy, so there's less second-guessing. And for finance, it means less manual entry, fewer evenings spent reconciling, and reimbursements that don't drag into the following month
Because it all sits inside Business Central, you're not bolting on another disconnected tool - it's part of the same connected finance environment you already trust.
Availability
Expense Agent is currently in public preview, in English, for US-based organisations. Microsoft has said more countries and languages are planned, with further rollout expected from July 2026. As with any preview feature, it's worth reviewing suitability, configuration, licensing and regional availability before you make it part of a live process.
Let's work out what it could do for you
Whether you're already running Business Central or still weighing it up, the real question isn't whether the technology can do this - it's whether it's set up to work the way your team actually works. That's the part we care about.
At Kick, we've spent years helping organisations get more out of Business Central - from implementation and upgrades through to process improvement, training and ongoing support. We're happy to talk Expense Agent through and help you judge whether it's the right fit for your finance team.