A five-person finance team at a Nordic bank started most days with ninety minutes of checking journal entries, chasing missing attachments and moving treasury figures into Business Central by hand. None of it was hard. All of it had to be done.
What was in the way
Business Central holds the truth, but it does not read the inbox, chase a receipt or reconcile a treasury position. That work lived beside the ERP — in spreadsheets, in mail threads, in someone’s memory of which supplier always sends the paperwork late.
What I built
The vehicle was bc-mcp — an MCP server exposing a narrow, permissioned slice of Business Central as tools, so Copilot can query and act on the ERP inside the conversation. Three jobs moved onto it:
- Journal validation — accounts, dimensions, VAT, dates, period. What fails comes back with a reason, not a red dot.
- Attachment follow-up — postings without a supporting document surface on their own, with a list of what is still outstanding.
- Treasury into BC — positions pulled through the same tool layer, so cash sits in the ERP instead of a workbook.
What it changed
About ninety minutes a day across the team — seven and a half hours a week. What remains is review: someone reads a short list of exceptions instead of opening fifty postings to find five. The judgement did not get automated away. The looking did.
Guardrails
Only selected people on the finance team can talk to the agents; only admins can edit them — prompts, tools, permissions. They run on GPT-5.6 Sol, with no screen scraping and no credentials sitting in a prompt.
The catch worth naming
Licence costs can eat the saved hours. Per-seat, per-conversation or per-Copilot-licence pricing turns a ninety-minute win into an invoice, and the ROI moves from the timesheet to procurement. That is why I run the same pattern on Hermes for Business: model choice stays yours, cheap models where cheap is good enough, and a cost per month you can predict.
If your finance team loses its first hour to the same three jobs, describe the morning — [email protected].