Creating invoices during the meeting, with Copilot in Teams
The deal is done: 40 hours of consultancy at €100 per hour. Normally you write that down and someone turns it into an invoice later in the week. In this demo the draft invoice is in Exact Online before the meeting ends, created from a chat in Microsoft Teams.
The video above shows the whole route: from a prompt in the Copilot pane of Microsoft Teams to a draft invoice in Exact Online, with the item line, the contact person and VAT in place. No export, no retyping. Exact itself only opens at the end, to check that everything is right. The demo is recorded in Dutch, but the flow is easy to follow.
What happens in the demo
The scenario is a conversation you have every week. Meijer Logistiek BV buys 40 hours of consultancy at €100 per hour. The contact person is Willem van der Laan, his phone number is in the prompt, and the customer does not exist in the administration yet. That single prompt is enough to start the process.
- The agent first checks what already exists. Before anything is created, the connector searches the administration for the customer and the contact person, and whether they are linked. Whatever is already there gets reused; with an existing customer the agent simply skips the creating.
- Every write action asks for your confirmation. Per action Copilot shows a card with exactly what is about to happen, and you click Confirm. The contact person, the customer and the invoice: none of the three is created without approval.
- The invoice is ready as a draft. Meijer Logistiek, 40 hours of consultancy at €100, with the item linked: €4,840 including 21% VAT. There is no invoice number yet; that is only assigned once you process and send the invoice in Exact Online.
The demo is deliberately not polished. Halfway through, the agent reports that it cannot find the customer, right after creating it. One follow-up prompt, “check whether Meijer Logistiek BV exists as a customer”, and it picks the thread back up: customer found, contact person linked, invoice created. That is what working with an agent looks like in practice: it does the work, you steer where needed.
"The invoice is created where the agreement is made. What remains for later is not the data entry, only the review and the send button."
What Microsoft 365 Copilot does here
In this setup Copilot is more than a chat window: it is the environment agents run in. The DataFlowr agent is one of them. You open it in the Copilot pane of Teams, next to your chats and your calendar, and that is exactly the point: the work happens in the application where the agreement is made, not in the package where the invoice lands.
Copilot itself does three things here. It translates your sentence into concrete actions on the connector, in a sensible order: search first, then create, then link. It guards the write actions with a confirmation step, so an agent never puts anything in your administration unasked. And it holds on to the context of the conversation: “link the contact person to this customer” is enough, without naming again who it is about.
The role of MCP
Under the hood Copilot talks to our MCP server for Exact Online. MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is the open standard that describes which tools an AI assistant may use on a system. For this demo those are tools like searching customers, creating a contact person and writing a draft invoice. The assistant picks a tool per step, and the data comes straight from your own administration at that moment. There is no copy of your books in between.
Access runs through your own Exact Online login, so the agent sees exactly what you are allowed to see. And because MCP is an open standard, Copilot is a choice, not an obligation: the same connector works in Claude and ChatGPT. Two practical notes on Microsoft: Copilot requires its own licence on top of Microsoft 365, and it cannot add a connection by address. That is why we provide a ready-made package for Copilot that your administrator installs once.
Where the gain is
The gain is not the few minutes of typing, but the step that disappears. Normally an agreement like this travels from a note to a task to the accounting package, and something can get lost at every handover: the rate, the company name, the contact person. Here the agreement is recorded while it is fresh. What remains for later is reviewing the draft and sending it.
Just as important is what does not happen. The agent sends nothing and posts nothing final; the invoice waits as a draft for your review. Every create action was explicitly confirmed by you. And the result is no black box: at the end of the video you see the invoice sitting in Exact Online, with the customer, the contact person and the item in the right place.
Try it yourself
The route in the video works on any Exact Online administration with our connector. The setup for Microsoft 365 Copilot is documented step by step, including the package for your administrator, and the agent ships with example prompts for this scenario among others. Rather see first whether this fits your process? Book an intro call and we will run the demo on a test administration.
