TL;DR:<\/strong><\/p>\n Before anyone on your team sees a Copilot sidecar, check three things. First, confirm your Project Operations version, since Copilot in time entry is only available from specific general-availability releases onward. Second, verify that Copilot is turned on tenant-wide for model-driven apps. Third, understand a quirk that trips up distributed teams: Copilot only suggests entries for the current week and uses UTC to determine which week that is, not the user\u2019s local time zone.<\/p>\n That UTC behavior matters more than it sounds. A consultant in Vancouver working late Sunday night might find Copilot has already rolled into a new week by its own clock.<\/p>\n Enabling the feature is a five-minute job for an admin with the right access. Disabling it is just as fast if you decide the timing isn\u2019t right for your team yet.<\/p>\n The most common mix-up here is confusing the Project Operations feature flag with tenant Copilot enablement. Both have to be on. One without the other leaves users staring at a normal grid with no sidecar in sight.<\/p>\n Users open the sidecar by clicking the Copilot icon next to their avatar in the top corner of the time entry screen. From there, a chat pane opens where plain-language commands do the work that used to take several clicks.<\/p>\n A handful of starter commands cover most needs:<\/p>\n Watch for the small sparkle icon on any row Copilot touches. That\u2019s the visual cue marking AI-generated content, and it disappears the moment a user edits the entry manually. One easy-to-miss detail: the grid does not refresh automatically after an AI action<\/a>, so you have to hit refresh yourself to see new drafts appear.<\/p>\n Getting a clean week of time entries with Copilot follows a fairly consistent pattern once you\u2019ve done it a few times.<\/p>\n Copilot pulls from active project assignments to build its suggestions, and it\u2019s built to skip entries that already exist so you don\u2019t end up with duplicate rows for the same task. The catch is that stale assignment data produces stale suggestions. If someone rolled off a project last week and the assignment record hasn\u2019t caught up, Copilot may draft time against work that\u2019s already finished.<\/p>\n Pro Tip:<\/strong> Run a five-minute assignment audit every Monday morning before your team touches Copilot. Clean inputs are the single biggest driver of accurate drafts, and it costs less time than fixing bad entries on Friday.<\/em><\/p>\n Time entry narratives are usually the part professionals procrastinate on, and they\u2019re also the part clients actually read on an invoice. Copilot shortens that gap.<\/p>\n Comment generation runs on Azure OpenAI\u2019s language model capabilities, and Microsoft\u2019s own guidance is explicit that these drafts need human review before they hit a client invoice. Treat the 100-character guideline as a floor for editing, not a finished product.<\/p>\n If your firm wants time capture inside Microsoft Teams rather than the Dynamics 365 grid, the Time Entry Agent preview is the tool built for that. It syncs project assignments and calendar events into draft entries and can send reminder-style alerts, but it requires Project Operations version 4.140.0.239 or later.<\/p>\n Getting it live takes more coordination than the standard feature toggle, requiring detailed implementation blueprints for automation workflows like those in AI SDR vs. SDR Agency \u2014 An Honest Comparison<\/a>.<\/p>\n Copilot is a drafting tool, not an autonomous timekeeper. Microsoft\u2019s own responsible AI guidance frames it as a review-and-confirm workflow, and firms that treat it that way avoid most of the friction that comes with rolling out AI to billable professionals.<\/p>\n Pro Tip:<\/strong> Set a simple rule: any entry or comment carrying the sparkle icon gets a second look from a project lead before it\u2019s billed. That one habit does more for accuracy than any feature setting.<\/em><\/p>\n Give approvers visibility into which entries were AI-generated versus manually typed, and check usage telemetry periodically to confirm the feature is actually being used rather than sitting idle.<\/p>\n Most issues fall into three buckets, and each has a fast diagnostic path.<\/p>\n Enabling Copilot in time entry is a configuration task. Getting a real return from it is an adoption problem, and that\u2019s where most mid-market firms lose the thread. Start with telemetry, not enthusiasm: measure how many Copilot licenses are actually being used before you roll anything out further, and set a baseline for time-to-invoice across your busiest practice group.<\/p>\n Run a focused pilot next. Pick one high-frequency team, turn on time entry drafting plus comment generation, and track recovered billable time over four to six weeks. Firms that log time contemporaneously with AI-assisted narratives tend to see fewer fee disputes and faster billing cycles<\/a> as a direct result.<\/p>\n Law firms in particular tend to see fast wins here, since narrative time entries carry outsized weight on client invoices. A Copilot ROI playbook for law firms walks through how one practice group structured its pilot around exactly this metric.<\/p>\n The gap between what Copilot promises and what firms actually capture almost always comes down to sequencing. Pilot with one team first, instrument telemetry from day one, and resist the urge to roll it out firm-wide before you\u2019ve seen four weeks of real usage data. Prioritize a review-by-user workflow over speed. Every dispute avoided and every hour recovered is the metric that proves the license was worth paying for.<\/p>\n \u2014 Mad<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Enable Copilot for time entry, run a telemetry first 4\u20136 week pilot, and turn drafts into recoverable billable hours with admin checks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":340,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n\n
\nTable of Contents<\/h2>\n
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Availability and Prerequisites for Copilot in Time Entry<\/h2>\n
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How Do You Enable or Disable Copilot in Time Entry?<\/h2>\n
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How Do You Access the Copilot Sidecar in Time Entry?<\/h2>\n
![\"Time-entry](\"https:\/\/gozera.ai\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/1788489233342_Time-entry-workspace-beside-Copilot-sidecar.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n\n
How to Log Time With Copilot Without Creating Gaps or Duplicates<\/h2>\n
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Generating External Comments With Copilot<\/h2>\n
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Time Entry Agent (Preview): Admin Publish Checklist<\/h2>\n
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Responsible AI: Limits and Governance Controls That Matter<\/h2>\n
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Fixing the Most Common Copilot Time Entry Problems<\/h2>\n
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Turning Copilot Adoption Into Recoverable Billable Time<\/h2>\n
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Essential Resources for Enabling Copilot in Time Entry<\/h2>\n
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Where Firms Actually Recover Billable Time With Copilot<\/h2>\n
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Sources<\/h2>\n
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Recommended<\/h2>\n
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