Last updated: November 4, 2026
By ZapAI Team
Business Central agents are AI workers built into Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central that read email, do the data entry, and stop for a human before anything goes out or hits the ledger. As of November 2026, two are generally available, the Sales Order Agent and the Payables Agent. The Expense Agent is a production-ready preview. Custom agents are still a preview. All of them bill in Copilot Credits.
Business Central agents are built-in AI agents that turn emailed quote requests, vendor invoices and expense receipts into draft documents, then wait for human review. They run on Business Central online and bill in Copilot Credits.
Most posts about these agents stop at the demo. Email arrives, quote appears, everyone claps. Fine. But the questions Business Central customers actually ask us, once the demo is over and somebody in sales or AP has to own the process every day, are duller and a good deal more expensive. Which mailbox? Who reviews? What happens when credits run out on the 20th? And what does one invoice cost?
That’s what this guide covers. Our roundup of Copilot use cases across Dynamics 365 gave each agent a line or two. Here each one gets setup, permissions, billing math, limits and the audit trail, with every product fact checked against Microsoft Learn documentation and Microsoft’s own pricing pages as of November 2026. Ignite, running November 17 to 20, may move some of them.
What Are Business Central Agents?
They’re AI agents that work inside Business Central under their own user account. Each one gets natural language instructions, a permission set and a role, then moves through pages and fills fields the way a person would, pausing whenever a human needs to check its work.
That design matters. Because the agent reads captions, tooltips and page data at each step instead of following a fixed script, Microsoft’s Sales Order Agent overview says it can find custom fields and even try to fix validation errors itself. Good news if your partner added fields. Bad news if they sit on a page the agent’s profile can’t see.
Agents aren’t Copilot features. Sales line suggestions, bank reconciliation assist, marketing text and the other Copilot helpers run only when a user clicks something, and they come included with the Business Central license you already pay for. Agents run in the background, watch a mailbox, and bill per action. Different animal.
One limit up front. Agents need Business Central online. On-premises customers don’t get them, which keeps the cloud question alive in our Business Central implementation guide.
Which Agents Does Business Central Have in November 2026?
Four, at different maturity levels. The Sales Order Agent and Payables Agent are generally available. The Expense Agent is a production-ready preview. Custom agents, built with Microsoft’s AI development toolkit, are a preview, and designing them works in sandboxes only.
| Agent | Status, November 2026 | Input | Output | Copilot Credits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sales Order Agent | Generally available | Customer emails with PDF, PNG or JPG attachments | Sales quote, then sales order if configured | 2 to 5 per step, about 14 per basic request |
| Payables Agent | Generally available | Vendor invoice PDFs | Unposted purchase invoice, never posted | 50 per invoice plus 5 per line |
| Expense Agent | Production-ready preview | Receipts via web app, mobile app or mailbox | Monthly expense reports | 50 per receipt |
| Custom agents | Preview, design in sandboxes only | Tasks you define | Whatever its permissions allow | Billable, toolkit rates not yet announced |
Language support differs. Microsoft’s country and language availability table lists every Business Central country for all three Microsoft agents, and supports the Sales Order Agent in English plus nine European languages. One wrinkle. The Payables Agent setup page still says it’s validated in English for the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand, while the table lists ten more languages, so two Microsoft pages disagree. US companies working in English are fine. Everyone else should test first.
How Does the Sales Order Agent Work, Step by Step?
It watches a shared mailbox, matches the sender to a contact by email address, finds the requested items, checks availability, drafts a sales quote and a reply, and waits for a user to approve the email. When the customer confirms, it converts the quote to an order.
Here’s the default flow, trimmed to what a sales desk sees.
- A customer emails the monitored mailbox.
- The agent runs a relevance check that filters out things like sales pitches and discount requests, then a reviewer confirms the incoming email.
- It finds the contact, then the items, trying item numbers, GTINs and references first, then attributes, then a fuzzy search.
- Availability gets checked. With capable-to-promise on, it also works out the earliest realistic ship date for items you don’t stock.
- Quote created, reply drafted, PDF attached.
- A user approves. Only then does the email go out.
- When the customer accepts, the agent converts the quote to an order and drafts a confirmation, which a user approves too.
Notice step five. The agent always creates a quote first, even when the customer asks for an order. Smart call. Quotes don’t touch planning, reservations or cash flow forecasts, so they’re a safe scratchpad for AI. For trusted customers, two toggles (Send quotes for confirmation off, Make orders from quotes on) skip the customer-facing quote and go straight to a sales order the customer receives by email.
Setup and permissions
Setup is mostly Microsoft 365 plumbing. The Sales Order Agent setup guide lists what you’ll need.
- the Configure All Agents permission (ID 9665), granted by the AGENT – ADMIN permission set
- A Microsoft 365 shared mailbox, with Full Access and Send as delegated to whoever sets up monitoring. Exchange can take hours to propagate those rights.
- billing set up for the environment
- Reviewers with Manage Agent Tasks (ID 9670) on the agent’s user access list. Essentials and Premium licenses include it.
- Clean contact emails. The step people skip.
That last bullet matters most. The agent identifies customers only by matching the sender’s address to the E-Mail field on contact cards. Not by name. Not by company. Microsoft does it on purpose, so nobody can pose as a customer with a lookalike name, but a contact with a blank or stale email lands in manual review every single time. Forwarded emails hit the same wall.
The agent gets its own Business Central user with the SOA – EDIT permission set, which you can copy and extend but not edit. Extensions are where this bites. If an ISV app adds required fields to the sales quote, the agent may need that app’s permission set and a profile that shows the fields, and Microsoft’s setup page walks through the fix.
Settings that decide how much it does alone
Only four settings really matter at first.
- Review for incoming messages. By default, the first message from a registered sender gets reviewed, and every message from an unregistered sender does.
- Select only available items, off by default. Leave it off and the agent can quote stock you don’t have.
- Daily email limit, 100 unless changed
- Review quotes and review orders when created, both off by default. Turn them on if pricing needs a human touch before the PDF exists.
You can also run several Sales Order Agent instances in one company, each with its own mailbox and rules. A cautious shared inbox for everyone. A faster lane for trusted accounts. We like that pattern, because a sales team can build trust one customer group at a time instead of betting the whole order desk on week one.
How Does the Payables Agent Work?
It monitors a mailbox for vendor invoice PDFs, extracts the data with Azure Document Intelligence, identifies the vendor, suggests G/L accounts, items or purchase order matches line by line, and builds a purchase document draft. After review, it finalizes the draft into an unposted purchase invoice. It never posts.
Per Microsoft’s Payables Agent overview, the flow runs like this.
- A vendor emails an invoice to the monitored mailbox, or an employee forwards one.
- Each PDF becomes an entry in Inbound E-Documents.
- OCR pulls out the vendor, dates, amounts and lines.
- The agent matches the vendor by registration numbers, then name, address and history. Can’t find one? It asks a supervisor, and can create the vendor from the OCR data if told to.
- Line by line, it drafts accounts, items and deferrals from your history, and proposes purchase order lines when the invoice references an order.
- A supervisor reviews the draft.
- Finalized, it becomes an unposted purchase invoice, ready for your approval workflow.
Two control details matter to any controller. A vendor the agent creates is set to Blocked All until someone unblocks it, because vendor and bank approval needs a human callback, and the agent itself has no vendor approval feature at all. And confirming a draft isn’t an approval workflow. The Payables Agent FAQ says plainly that the agent provides no vendor or invoice approval workflows. Keep yours on.
Setup, mailbox and trial mode
Prerequisites mirror the Sales Order Agent’s. One Payables Agent per company. A Microsoft 365 mailbox with Full Access for whoever configures it. An agent account running the PAYABLES AG. – RUN permission set.
Microsoft recommends a shared mailbox that stays internal, never exposed to vendors, with your AP team forwarding invoices in. Your people see every invoice first, which helps catch fraud. We’d add one rule. Give each agent its own mailbox, since Microsoft warns that sharing one between the Payables Agent and the Sales Order Agent causes conflicts over who owns each incoming email in the folder. And keep people out of it in Outlook.
Email review has three modes. Manage per sender, the recommended one, skips review for approved known senders and authenticated internal senders, and asks about everyone else. Never and Always do what they say.
Then there’s trial mode. In a production environment where the agent hasn’t been activated, the first 50 invoices process free, per the Payables Agent setup guide. After invoice 50 it switches to paid mode without asking. Use real invoices. Not samples.
Limits worth knowing
- PDF only. No other formats.
- Emails with more than 10 attachments get skipped.
- PDFs over 10 pages or 5 MB aren’t processed
- 100 emails and 500 invoices a day, maximum
- No anomaly detection. No approval flows.
- Order matching skips Charge (Item) and prepayment lines
Suggestions also lean on history. A company fresh off QuickBooks will see fewer automatic suggestions in month one, worth knowing before you plan a QuickBooks to Business Central migration around the agent.
What About the Expense Agent and Custom Agents?
The Expense Agent turns receipts into expense reports and is a production-ready preview. Custom agents come from Microsoft’s AI development toolkit, a preview whose designer runs in sandboxes only. Neither should carry a production process without a fallback yet.
Expense Agent first. Employees submit receipts through a web app, a mobile app or a shared mailbox, without a Business Central license. The agent extracts merchant, date, amount, currency and payment method, assigns a category, handles per diem and mileage, and builds a monthly expense report per employee for review and approval. Each receipt costs 50 Copilot Credits, per Microsoft’s Expense Agent overview.
Custom agents are a different job. Microsoft’s designing and coding agents page pitches the toolkit for prototyping, with designed agents limited to sandboxes from version 27.2 and English only. Coded agents built with the Agent SDK for AL can run in production from version 28.1. An agent can’t hold more permissions than its creator, and it sees one list per page.
Need something bigger? Our guide to building an AI agent for Dynamics 365 covers when Copilot Studio is the better home, and our Copilot Studio vs custom AI agents comparison goes further.
How Much Do Business Central Agents Cost?
Agents bill per action in Copilot Credits, sold separately from Business Central licenses. You buy credits as a prepaid pack of 25,000 for $200 a month, or pay as you go through an Azure subscription. A basic Sales Order Agent request runs about 14 credits. A three-line vendor invoice runs 65.
| Agent and step | Copilot Studio event | Copilot Credits |
|---|---|---|
| Sales Order Agent, analyze email | Generative answer | 2 |
| Sales Order Agent, attachment with sales data | Agent action | 5 |
| Sales Order Agent, attachment without sales data | Generative answer | 2 |
| Sales Order Agent, check availability | Agent action | 5 |
| Sales Order Agent, create or update quote or order | Agent action | 5 |
| Sales Order Agent, reply email | Generative answer | 2 |
| Payables Agent, process invoice | 10 agent actions | 50 |
| Payables Agent, each invoice line | Agent action | 5 |
| Expense Agent, each receipt | Flat rate | 50 |
Rates come from Microsoft’s consumption billing page for Business Central, as of November 2026. Emails with no valid invoice cost the Payables Agent nothing.
Now the math. Microsoft’s own example puts 100 Sales Order Agent requests a month, half with a usable PDF, at 1,650 credits, and 100 three-line vendor invoices at 6,500 credits on the same page. Microsoft lists the pack at $200 for 25,000 credits on its Copilot Studio page, or $0.008 a credit, so those workloads cost about $13 and $52 a month. Published guides put pay-as-you-go at one cent a credit, which would make them $16.50 and $65. Confirm that rate in the Azure pricing calculator before you budget, because the Microsoft pages we checked don’t print it.
Per document, that’s roughly 11 to 15 cents for a basic quote request and 52 cents for a three-line invoice. Cheap. Our view is that credits are rarely the expensive part. Review time is.
Some mechanics catch people out.
- Packs are tenant-wide and monthly, and unused credits don’t carry over, per Microsoft’s Copilot Studio licensing page.
- Business Central shares the tenant’s capacity with other Microsoft services unless you allocate credits to a linked Power Platform environment.
- Prepaid credits go first.
- An Azure subscription is required to use agents, says the Business Central pricing page, and prepaying Copilot Credit Commit Units can save up to 20%.
- Run out, and the agent stops taking new emails but stays scheduled.
Watch that last one. Say a mailbox piles up 600 emails during a credit outage. The day credits renew, the agent works through all of them, stale requests included, and a big slice of the new month’s prepaid capacity is gone before anyone in finance notices. Microsoft’s advice is to deactivate the agent before credits run out and clear old emails before reactivating. For license prices, see our Business Central pricing breakdown. For credits across every Microsoft agent, read our Copilot Studio pricing guide.
How Do Human Review, Security and Audit Work?
Each agent runs under its own Business Central user with its own permission sets, so every change is attributed to the agent. Users approve steps in the Tasks pane or on the page itself, and a data review bar flags every field an agent touched.
Review happens in two places, per Microsoft’s guide to supervising agent activities. The Tasks pane shows a timeline of every step. On the document, a review bar lists each field an agent changed, with a tip showing which agent set it, why, and how confident it was, so a reviewer never has to guess what came from the agent. Orange means low confidence. Select Done, and Business Central records your name and the date.
Instructions you type to unblock an agent apply to that step only. Stopped tasks can’t restart. So stop with care.
For an auditor, these are the facts that matter.
- Agents can’t exceed the permission sets and profile an admin assigns.
- The Agent Task Log records each action, and admins with AGENT – DIAGNOSTICS can see the page snapshot the agent saw.
- Prompts and responses are kept 20 days inside your data’s geographic boundary, for support only, with Customer Lockbox applying.
- Microsoft says it doesn’t train AI models on your data, prompts or responses.
- Admins can deactivate any agent per company.
Our practice view, labeled as opinion. Separate the person who configures an agent from the people who review its work, the way you’d separate vendor setup from payment approval. And keep approval workflows on for invoices above whatever threshold already needs a second signature.
Where Do Agents Fit, and Where Don’t They?
They fit repetitive, email-driven work with clean master data, like quote requests from known customers and PDF invoices from regular vendors. They don’t fit EDI, negotiated pricing, AP volume above 500 invoices a day, or anyone still on premises.
Where we’d point an agent first.
- A sales desk retyping emailed purchase orders from repeat B2B customers
- AP teams buried in PDF invoices from regular vendors with predictable coding
- Field staff who lose receipts, if you accept preview terms
- Companies with item descriptions and references worth searching. The agent finds items only as well as your catalog describes them.
Poor fits, for now.
- EDI orders. Those belong in e-documents, where EDI exchange entered public preview in version 29.
- Quotes needing negotiated pricing or configurators
- Invoices sent as image files or long PDFs
- Any process where review gets skipped because people are busy. An unreviewed agent is just faster mistakes.
Bigger cross-system work is a separate build. An agent that reads your CRM, checks a contract in SharePoint and writes to Business Central belongs in Copilot Studio or custom code, which our AI agent development team scopes apart from the built-in agents. Version 29 also made data queries through the Business Central MCP Server generally available. Approval routing around the agents is Power Automate work, covered by our AI automation services.
How Should You Roll Out a Business Central Agent?
Pilot one agent on one mailbox in a sandbox, then in production with full review on. Monitor credits and corrections weekly. Measure touch time and correction rate against a baseline captured before go-live. Loosen review only after a few clean weeks.
That’s ZapAI practice, not a Microsoft rule. Short checklist below.
Pilot
- Pick one agent. Payables if AP is the bottleneck.
- Fix contact emails, item references and vendor registration numbers before day one.
- Test in a sandbox, where you turn on Allow HttpClient Requests in the agent’s extension settings, then use the 50 free Payables invoices in production.
- One mailbox per agent
- Review on everything at the start.
Monitor
- Check credits weekly in the agent’s Cost section and the Power Platform admin center.
- Already on Application Insights? Send AI consumption telemetry there.
- Watch Needs Attention. Repeated blocks usually trace back to master data, which is where Microsoft’s own troubleshooting starts.
- Daily email cap set
Measure
- Capture a baseline before go-live, like minutes per invoice and the share of documents someone corrects.
- Track which fields get edited.
- Credit spend per document versus the labor it replaced
- Loosen one review setting at a time.
Rolling agents into a live environment sits inside the wider work our Dynamics 365 consulting team does, from permissions to master data cleanup.
What Could Change After Ignite 2026?
Possibly a lot. Ignite runs November 17 to 20, 2026, in San Francisco. Treat this post’s status labels and credit rates as a snapshot, and expect a refresh by late November.
Things we’ll check first. Whether the Expense Agent goes GA, whether agent design reaches production, whether the toolkit gets billing rates, and whether credit prices move. The version 29 release notes also put a new Microsoft Copilot chat experience into public preview. Since September 2026, Business Central changes appear on the AI at Work roadmap instead of release plans, as our guide to the Dynamics 365 release wave changes explains.
Wrapping Up
Two agents are ready for production in November 2026. The Sales Order Agent turns emailed requests into quotes and orders, and the Payables Agent turns PDF invoices into unposted purchase invoices. Both stop for a human, both cost cents per document, and both depend on clean master data more than on any setting. The previews are worth piloting. Not betting on.
ZapAI is a Microsoft Dynamics 365, Power Platform, Fabric and AI consulting firm in Irving, Texas, working with businesses across Dallas-Fort Worth and nationwide. Our Business Central consultants configure agents, mailboxes, permissions and credit billing, and fix the master data underneath. Want a second opinion first? Talk to us about a Business Central agent pilot, and we’ll check your mailboxes, contacts, vendors and credit setup before anything goes live.
Questions Business Central Teams Ask About Agents
Are the Sales Order Agent and Payables Agent generally available?
Yes. Both are listed under Generally available on the Copilot and agent capabilities page as of November 2026. Both need Business Central online plus Copilot Credit billing set up for the environment.
Do Business Central agents post transactions on their own?
No. The Payables Agent finalizes reviewed drafts into unposted purchase invoices and never posts them. The Sales Order Agent creates quotes and orders, but a user must approve every email it sends.
What does one vendor invoice cost in Copilot Credits?
50 credits per invoice plus 5 per line, so a three-line invoice uses 65. Emails without a valid invoice PDF cost nothing. At the pack rate of $200 for 25,000 credits, that comes to about 52 cents.
Can the Sales Order Agent and Payables Agent share a mailbox?
Microsoft advises against it, because two agents on one mailbox can conflict over who owns each email. Give each agent its own mailbox.
Is there a free trial for Business Central agents?
For the Payables Agent, yes. In a production environment where it hasn’t been activated, the first 50 invoices process without billable credits. Microsoft documents no equivalent trial for the Sales Order Agent, though you can start test tasks by hand from its Try it out section before connecting a mailbox.
Can we build our own Business Central agent?
In a sandbox, yes. The agent design experience is a preview for sandboxes, English only, meant for prototyping. Coded agents built with the Agent SDK for AL can run in production from version 28.1.
Do agents work with Business Central on premises?
Not today. Copilot and agent capabilities require Business Central online, which makes agents one more input to a cloud migration decision.