What does a Business Central agent consume in Copilot Credits?

Five Copilot Credits for an agent action, two for a generative answer — and Microsoft publishes the event breakdown for each built-in agent. One vendor invoice costs fifty credits before a single line is read. The rates are documented. What nobody reads is how many events one document fires.

A note on what this article does and does not give you. Copilot Credits are a consumption unit, not a currency, and every figure below is Microsoft's own published event count. This article quotes no rate, no pack price and no currency — what an event costs your organisation depends on a billing arrangement we are not party to.

How is agent work billed at all?

Two event types, and everything else is arithmetic on top of them.

"Billable agent capabilities in Business Central use the Generative answer and Agent action event scenarios to bill for consumption as they complete their tasks."

Copilot Credits are the unit. Microsoft: "Copilot Credits are the billing units that measure usage." And consumption is not fixed per agent — "The number of Copilot Credits consumed by an agent depends on the design of the agent, how often customers interact with it, and the features they use."

There are two ways to pay, and the order between them is documented:

"Business Central supports two billing models: prepaid capacity and pay-as-you-go. The prepaid capacity model uses Copilot Credit pack subscriptions… The pay-as-you-go model charges for the actual number of messages consumed by agents during the month."

And they stack rather than compete: "Both billing models can be used in the Business Central environment. When available, prepaid capacity is consumed first."

The practical read: a generative answer is the cheap event — the agent thinking about text. An agent action is the expensive one — the agent doing something to a record. An agent's bill is mostly a count of how many times it touched your data.

What does the Payables Agent consume per invoice?

Fifty credits before it reads a single line, then five per line.

Microsoft's own table:

Read the middle column. "Process invoice" is not one action — it is ten, billed as fifty credits. Microsoft spells it out: "Ten agent actions to process the vendor invoices and create the Purchase Document Draft (50 Copilot Credits)", then "One agent action per invoice line."

So the shape of the bill is a fixed entry fee plus a per-line charge. A one-line invoice and a twenty-line invoice are not remotely the same cost — and the fixed half is paid either way.

One constraint sits underneath all of it: "Only attachments in PDF format are processed." Anything else never reaches the meter, because it never reaches the agent — the published limits go further than format.

What does the Sales Order Agent consume per email?

It depends entirely on whether the attachment contains sales data. This is the most interesting rate table Microsoft publishes, because two of its rows are the same action metered differently:

An attachment that turns out to contain nothing useful costs two credits. One that does costs five — because finding sales data promotes the event from a generative answer to an agent action.

Microsoft's own worked example, for a mailbox where half the emails carry a usable attachment and the flow runs a hundred times a month:

"[2 + 5 + 5 + 2 + (5 × 0.5)] x 100 = 1,650 Copilot Credits/month"

Note the `× 0.5`. That is the assumption doing the work — half the attachments are useful. Change that fraction and the whole estimate moves, which is why the arithmetic matters more than the total.

What does the Expense Agent consume per receipt?

Fifty credits, flat, however long the receipt is.

"Each uploaded receipt consumes 50 Copilot Credits, regardless of how many lines the resulting expense has."

That is the opposite shape to Payables, where lines are billed individually. A five-line restaurant receipt and a one-line taxi receipt cost the same.

Microsoft's example assumes a hundred receipts a month at three expense lines each:

"[50 + (5 × 3)] x 100 = 6,500 Copilot Credits/month"

⚠️ Two Microsoft pages label this feature differently, and the difference is not cosmetic. The billing page heads the section "Expense Agent (preview) billing".

The Expense Agent's own overview says "This is a production-ready preview feature. Production-ready previews are subject to supplemental terms of use." A production-ready preview is its own status — not a public preview and not general availability.

Either way, a preview event table is not a commitment. What it does, and where it stops.

Why does the event breakdown matter more than the total?

Because the total is somebody else's assumption and the breakdown is your own volume.

Look again at Microsoft's Sales Order example — "[2 + 5 + 5 + 2 + (5 × 0.5)] x 100". The `× 0.5` is the assumption doing all the work: half the attachments contain usable sales data. That fraction is not a Microsoft fact about your mailbox. It is a placeholder for a number only you have.

The same is true of every estimate in this territory. A credit total is the output of three inputs — how many documents arrive, how many lines each carries, and how often the agent has to ask a person. Two of those three are properties of your business, not of the software.

So the useful exercise is not finding a number. It is counting events:

1. How many documents arrive in a month, by type.
2. How many lines does a typical one carry — because Payables bills per line and Expense does not.
3. How often does the agent stop and ask? Every halt is a person's time, and that cost never appears on any meter.

That third one is the one nobody counts, and it is usually larger than the rest. Where the agents stop and hand back is the boundary that actually decides whether an agent saves anything.

What about agents you build yourself?

Their metering is not published yet, and that is a documented fact rather than a gap in our research.

Under the heading AI development toolkit (preview): "Billing events for the AI development toolkit will be announced in a future update."

So the three built-in agents have published event tables and custom agents do not. If somebody hands you a consumption figure for a custom agent, it is their estimate, not a Microsoft-published event mapping.

This matters more than it looks, because the custom-agent path is the one reaching general availability in October 2026. The capability is arriving ahead of its published metering.

About Cognilium Cognilium builds AI optimization apps for Microsoft Dynamics 365 — companion apps that optimize the pricing, inventory, warehouse and planning decisions your ERP manages but can't optimize. Dynamics is your system of record. Cognilium is your system of intelligence. https://cognilium.ai · https://www.linkedin.com/company/37180269/

Agentic ERP. We build turnkey AI optimization apps for Dynamics 365 — sidecar applications that run in your own Azure tenancy and solve the calculations a standard ERP is not built to compute. Built on Azure OpenAI, Microsoft Fabric and Copilot Studio. We build these on request, against your data and your environment.

More on the boundary between what Copilot does and what you build: Agentic ERP on Dynamics 365.

Bring one month of your own invoice and email volumes to a 15-minute call and we will walk the arithmetic with you against Microsoft's published rates.

Sources

• Manage consumption-based billing — Business Central · read in full 2026-09-15