What Business Central Agents Really Cost, Document by Document
At Directions EMEA 2026, the Business Central partner conference held in Paris at the end of October, Microsoft put a dollar figure on each of its agents: about $0.75 per vendor invoice for the Payables Agent, about $0.20 per email for the Sales Order Agent, about $0.50 per receipt for the Expense Agent. Those are announcements, to be confirmed in Microsoft’s price list. The credit rates behind them are not: they are published on Microsoft Learn, and they show that an agent is billed per document, not per user. For a group running several companies on Business Central, that turns AI into an operating cost that grows with volume.
How are Business Central agents billed?
In Copilot Credits, per action. Microsoft Learn lists the billable agent capabilities: the Payables Agent, the Sales Order Agent, the Expense Agent (in preview) and agents built with the AI development toolkit (in preview, billing to be announced).
The published rates:
| Agent | What triggers a charge | Copilot Credits |
|---|---|---|
| Payables Agent | Each vendor invoice processed | 50 |
| Payables Agent | Each invoice line | 5 |
| Sales Order Agent | Analysing the incoming email | 2 |
| Sales Order Agent | Each attachment without sales data / with sales data | 2 / 5 |
| Sales Order Agent | Checking item availability | 5 |
| Sales Order Agent | Creating or updating a quote or an order | 5 |
| Sales Order Agent | Writing the reply email | 2 |
| Expense Agent (preview) | Each uploaded receipt, whatever its number of lines | 50 |
Emails that carry no valid invoice attachment cost nothing on the Payables side. The Payables Agent also has a trial mode that processes the first 50 invoices free of charge.
How much is one credit worth?
Microsoft announced at Directions EMEA 2026 that one Copilot Credit is worth $0.01. Learn sends readers to the Copilot Studio pricing page for the pay-as-you-go price, so treat the dollar figure as an announcement until your reseller quotes it.
The per-document figures then follow from the published rates. A vendor invoice with five lines costs 50 + (5 × 5) = 75 credits, which is the $0.75 Microsoft quoted. A typical Sales Order Agent email, as Microsoft Learn describes it, runs 2 + 5 + 5 + 2 = 14 credits, plus the attachments. A receipt in the Expense Agent costs 50 credits flat.
The line count is the variable that moves the most. A one-line invoice costs 55 credits; a twenty-line invoice costs 150. Two companies receiving the same number of invoices can have very different bills.
What does a group actually pay? A worked example
The volumes below are illustrative, not taken from any client. Take a group with four companies in Business Central. Together they receive 2,000 vendor invoices a month, with an average of six lines.
- Per invoice: 50 + (5 × 6) = 80 credits.
- Per month: 2,000 × 80 = 160,000 credits.
- At the announced $0.01 per credit: about $1,600 a month for accounts payable alone.
Now suppose one subsidiary buys from distributors whose invoices run to 25 lines. Its invoices cost 175 credits each, more than twice the group average, and that one company can weigh as much in the bill as two others together.
On the prepaid side, Microsoft Learn describes Copilot Credit packs of 25,000 credits a month. In this example the group would need between six and seven packs, or a pay-as-you-go setup for the overflow. Either way, the budget has to be sized on document volume and line count per company, not on headcount.
Who consumes the credits in a multi-company group?
Everyone on the tenant, unless someone decides otherwise. This is the part that matters most for a group, and it is documented on Learn.
- Capacity is shared. Copilot Credit capacity on the tenant is consumed by Business Central environments and by other Microsoft services. Without extra setup, Business Central draws on the default Power Platform environment.
- Allocation is per environment, not per company. An admin can allocate prepaid capacity to specific Power Platform environments, for example a small amount for sandboxes and more for production. Inside one Power Platform environment, other Microsoft services can consume the same capacity, and Learn states that capacity cannot be reserved for a specific service.
- Prepaid goes first. Both models can run together on one environment; when prepaid capacity is available, it is consumed before pay-as-you-go.
In practice, if four companies sit in one production environment, one busy subsidiary can use up the capacity the others were counting on. Separating them means separate environments and separate allocations, which is a structural decision, not a billing setting. It belongs with the other choices covered in our guide to Business Central multi-company setup.
The Payables Agent itself runs per company. Learn’s setup guide says each company can use its own dedicated mailbox, or a shared mailbox with one subfolder per company, routed by Outlook rules. Learn also lists a limit of 100 emails and 500 invoices a day for the agent.
What happens when the credits run out?
The agent does not switch off. Microsoft Learn says that when the quota is depleted, the Payables Agent stops processing new invoices but stays active and keeps running its scheduled task. When credits come back, at the start of a new billing period or after a purchase, it resumes on its own and picks up every unread invoice email that piled up in the meantime.
That is convenient for accounts payable and risky for the budget. A backlog of three weeks lands on the first days of the new period and can use a large share of the fresh capacity at once. Learn’s own advice is to deactivate the agent before credits run out if you do not want that automatic catch-up, and to clear stale emails from the monitored folder before reactivating it.
What else was announced at Directions EMEA 2026?
Two items change the picture without changing the per-document rates.
- Copilot Chat and the coming Edit mode in Business Central are included in the user licence, according to Microsoft’s announcements. Agents, Cowork and future skill calls are the part billed in credits. This matches what Learn already says about Copilot features being included with the licence, with the caveat that fair-use policies or quotas may come later.
- Calls to the Business Central MCP server are to be billed at $0.001 per call, announced as coming soon, with no date. For comparison, Learn already documents a rate of 0.1 credit per tool call for the Dynamics 365 ERP MCP server used by finance and operations apps from clients other than Copilot Studio. At the announced credit value, that is the same $0.001.
How these options compare on licensing, data access and write paths is the subject of our article on Copilot alternatives for Business Central. This article stays on the cost of the agents.
What should a group decide before switching agents on?
Five decisions, each with an owner.
- Which companies get an agent, and in which environment. That choice sets who shares capacity with whom.
- What the invoices look like. Count lines per invoice by company and by main supplier before projecting a budget. Data quality matters here too: an agent that cannot identify a vendor asks a supervisor for help, and a messy vendor master turns into more agent steps and more human review.
- Prepaid, pay-as-you-go, or both. Prepaid caps the risk; pay-as-you-go keeps processing going when volume spikes.
- What happens at the end of the quota. Either accept the automatic catch-up and budget for it, or deactivate the agent ahead of time.
- Who watches consumption. The agent’s configuration page shows the credits it has consumed, and the Power Platform admin center shows capacity per environment. Someone has to read both every month.
The Asio Services way
We treat an agent like any other cost centre: volume per company, cost per document, a named owner, and a monthly check. Before an agent goes live in a group, we map which companies share which environment and what their invoices actually look like, because that is where the bill is decided. It is part of how we approach AI for multi-entity groups. If you are weighing Business Central agents across several companies and want a budget that holds, start with a clarity session.
FAQ
How much does the Payables Agent cost per invoice?
Microsoft Learn sets it at 50 Copilot Credits per invoice plus 5 per invoice line. At the value Microsoft announced at Directions EMEA 2026, $0.01 per credit, a five-line invoice costs about $0.75.
Is Copilot in Business Central free?
Microsoft’s FAQ says Copilot features in Business Central are included with the licence, with possible fair-use policies or quotas later. Agents such as the Payables Agent and the Sales Order Agent are billed separately, in Copilot Credits.
Can I set a separate AI budget per company?
Not per company inside one environment. Capacity is allocated per Power Platform environment linked to Business Central environments, and other Microsoft services in the same environment draw on it too. Separate budgets need separate environments.
What happens if we run out of Copilot Credits?
The Payables Agent stops processing new invoices but stays active. When credits are renewed or purchased, it processes the whole backlog of unread invoice emails, which can consume a large part of the new capacity quickly.
Can I test an agent before paying?
Yes. The Payables Agent’s trial mode processes the first 50 invoices free of charge, which is enough to measure the typical credit consumption of your own invoices.