Data and Tech
Power BI Dashboards for Finance: Key Use Cases and Examples
We cover everything finance teams need to get started with building Power BI dashboards, including key use cases, examples and templates.
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Every FP&A professional knows the power of Microsoft Excel. But what if we told you there’s another Microsoft tool a lot of finance professionals are still missing out on?
Microsoft Power BI can be a game changer if you work in finance, with features that enhance the financial reporting process—including powerful data visualizations, access to wider data sources and agile forecasting and planning. It also integrates easily with Excel and other planning tools for a fully connected tech stack that will help you get your financial reporting done more effectively and efficiently.
Power BI’s unrivaled analytics capabilities and sophisticated data visualizations make it the best tool to drive data literacy across your finance team and beyond. It’s also a key solution for turning data into insights—and for sharing those insights across your executive team. That's why more FP&A professionals are making Power BI a key part of their financial decision making.
Let’s dive into how to best use Power BI for financial reporting and explore what you need to know to get started.
Power BI empowers FP&A teams to make real-time, data-driven decisions, enabling powerful financial reporting across income statements, balance sheets, cash flow reports, cash flow forecasts, customer profitability reports and more.
Power BI connects to a wider range of data sources and integrates seamlessly with Excel. It offers powerful data visualizations, shareable dashboards and agile forecasting and planning.
Power BI users can benefit from a range of artificial intelligence (AI) features, including smart data discovery and visualization, natural language query, anomaly detection, top segments and predictive forecasting.
Power BI is not exclusively a tool for finance. It has use cases for any part of your business that needs to make strategic use of data. However, the FP&A function has quickly evolved to become one of the strongest power users of Power BI. A game-changing solution for financial reporting, it provides a lot of value for finance teams, extending the functionality offered in Excel.
Today, after all, financial reporting is no longer a periodic event that happens quarterly or annually. Companies must be able to make real-time, data-driven financial decisions to remain agile in unpredictable economic conditions and stay competitive in fast-changing markets. And Power BI can help with that, promoting more frequent and effective financial reporting, better decision making, more accurate forecasts, greater resiliency and faster growth.
For FP&A teams, Power BI stands out for a variety of reasons, including:
Seamless Excel integration: Power BI seamlessly connects to Excel so teams can benefit from the best features of each tool and even use one to enhance the other.
Powerful data visualization: Financial reporting is enhanced in Power BI by its powerful data visualization capabilities, which can turn large and/or complex datasets into stories about performance.
Access to wider data sources: Power BI has access to a much wider list of data sources than Excel and can be used to seamlessly connect with multiple sources that contribute to financial reports (see the full list of dozens of Power BI-accessible data sources here).
Shareable dashboards: Power BI not only provides access to real-time insights but also allows for shared dashboard views across teams and departments. This means everyone can make decisions based on the same accurate data.
Agile forecasting and planning: Sales and revenue forecasting (and any other predictive planning activity) can be made more agile in Power BI because it can be done in an ongoing way. Teams no longer need to depend on forecasts done at the start of the year or quarter.
Higher data capacity: Power BI has a greater capacity than Excel to source and analyze large datasets. It’s the better option for combining data across sources and maintaining it in a single, centralized place.
Easy integration with planning tools: Power BI can be easily integrated with the type of comprehensive planning tools used by the most innovative and agile organizations today.
You can build Power BI financial statements across a range of use cases—from your income statement and balance sheets to your cash flow reports, cash flow forecasts and customer profitability reports.
To get started using Power BI for FP&A use cases, it helps to first have a deeper view of the building blocks available to you as you begin applying it to your financial statements.
Power BI has a range of powerful features you can apply to your financial reporting needs. Understanding each of these building blocks will help you maximize your use of Power BI’s functionality as you begin to apply it to your financial reporting. Some of these elements include:
A visualization is a visual representation of data, like a chart, a color-coded map or other interesting things you can create to represent your data visually. They can be simple, like a single number that represents something significant, or they can be visually complex, like a gradient-colored map that shows product sales across the country.
The goal of a visual is to present data in a way that provides context and insights, both of which would probably be difficult to discern from a raw table of numbers or text. Power BI offers all sorts of visualization types.
An example of a bar chart visualization created in Power BI to represent sales variance. (Source: Microsoft)
An example of an area chart visualization created in Power BI to represent a year over year comparison of sales volume by fiscal month. (Source: Microsoft)
A dataset is a collection of data that Power BI uses to create its visualizations. You can have a simple dataset that's based on a single table from an Excel workbook. Or you can have a dataset based on a combination of many different sources that you can filter and combine to provide a unique collection of data for use in Power BI. Filtering data before bringing it into Power BI lets you focus on the data that matters to you.
An important and enabling part of Power BI is the multitude of data connectors that are included. Whether the data you want is in Excel or a Microsoft SQL Server database, an ERP such as Oracle or a service like Facebook, Salesforce or MailChimp, Power BI has built-in data connectors that let you easily connect to that data, filter it if necessary and bring it into your dataset.
In Power BI, a report is a collection of visualizations that appear together on one or more pages. Reports let you create many visualizations, on multiple pages if necessary, and let you arrange those visualizations in whatever way best tells your story. Some uses of Power BI in finance might include a report about quarterly sales or on product growth in a particular segment. Whatever your subject, reports let you gather and organize your visualizations.
An example of a report created in Power BI. (Source: Microsoft)
When you're ready to share a report or collection of visualizations, you can create a dashboard. A Power BI dashboard is a collection of visuals that you can share with others—for instance, your executive team. Often, it's a selected group of visuals that provide quick insight into the data or story you're trying to present. You can pull visualizations from multiple Power BI reports into a dashboard. Examples of Power BI finance dashboards you might want to create could include a predictive analytics dashboard, a cash flow analysis dashboard or a revenue dashboard. And that’s just the start!
Finally, in Power BI, a tile is a single visualization on a dashboard. It's the rectangular box that holds an individual visual. When you're creating a dashboard in Power BI for your FP&A team, you can move or arrange tiles however you want. You can make them bigger, change their height or width and snuggle them up to other tiles to create the best design for your specific Power BI financial statement.
Another crucial element of Power BI is DAX, or Data Analysis Expressions.
DAX is Power BI’s formula language. It draws on a collection of functions, operators and constants that can be used in a formula or expression to calculate and return one or more values.
DAX is useful for financial teams because it helps you create custom calculations, define calculated columns, filter and analyze data across related tables, perform aggregations and time intelligence calculations and build new metrics based on existing data in your model. This is part of what makes Power BI for FP&A so powerful.
If you’re used to using Excel, it’s probably good to hear that DAX calculations do have some overlap with Excel calculations in how they function. The primary difference to note is that DAX functions operate on entire columns, as opposed to Excel, which functions primarily at the cell level.
Formulas are applied to full columns, rather than to a specific cell. This is often something Excel users have to get used to as they start putting Power BI to work. Power BI features over 200 functions and constructs, letting you create anything from basic financial metrics to complex KPIs and time-based analyses. All of which lets you better analyze and visualize your data and create more powerful financial reports.
Learn more about DAX calculations. Sign up for Vena Academy for free and start Introduction to DAX Calculations with Power BI Desktop.
Power BI also offers a range of AI-enabled features that can help with your financial reporting needs. Predictive forecasting, anomaly detection and natural language processing enhance your data analysis, add new efficiencies and reduce the chance of error. Here are some of the AI features available that empower Power BI for FP&A:
Smart Data Discovery and Visualization: Smart data discovery and visualization lets Power BI discover and visualize your data automatically.
Natural Language Query: Power BI’s Natural Language Query (NLQ) allows you to type in a question about your data and get answers and insights immediately.
Anomaly Detection: The anomaly detection feature can help you easily detect any unexpected patterns in your datasets, letting you recognize anomalies that could end up becoming new trends or represent data errors.
Key Influencers: Power BI’s key influencers visual analyzes your data, ranking the factors that matter and displaying them as key influencers. Consider workforce planning, for instance—if you want to understand what’s causing employees to leave, this could be a quick way to do so.
Top Segments: While the key influencers visual analyzes a single dimension, the top segments feature analyzes multiple dimensions together—allowing you to see the influencers made up of a combination of values.
Decomposition Tree: The decomposition tree visual helps you visualize data across multiple dimensions, automatically aggregating data and letting you drill down. AI assists you in determining the next dimension to drill down into based on your needs—making ad hoc exploration and root cause analysis more efficient.
Predictive Forecasting: Power BI also offers predictive forecasting capabilities, especially time series forecasting, allowing you to use historical data to predict future trends.
How you interact with Power BI for your financial reporting depends on whether you’re a user—the person creating a dashboard, report or visualization—or a viewer who’s had one of those dashboards shared with them. Let’s look at how those roles differ and what each can do within Power BI.
Your Power BI users are likely your financial analysts or FP&A managers and directors. These are the team members tasked with creating dashboards and reports on the Power BI desktop and/or the cloud-based Power BI service. If that’s you, you’ll be able to interact with the data and create the stories you want using Power BI dashboards.
Your usage of Power BI will likely follow these three steps:
Step 1: Create: Bring data into your Power BI desktop and create a report or visualization.
Step 2: Publish: Publish to the Power BI service, where you can create new visualizations or build dashboards.
Step 3: Share, view and interact: Share dashboards with others and view and interact with shared dashboards and reports.
For some of these users, using a single Excel table in a dataset and then sharing a dashboard with their team may be an incredibly valuable way to use Power BI. For others, the value of Power BI will be in using real-time Azure SQL Data Warehouse tables that combine with other databases and real-time sources to build a moment-by-moment dataset. The sky’s the limit, and how you use the rich functionality is up to you.
Power BI viewers are likely to be CFOs and vice presidents of finance, as well as other C-suite leaders such as CEOs and team members from other departments like operations. Creating dashboards and reports isn’t their job, but they can still get incredible value from Power BI and the insights offered through Power BI financial statements.
If this is you, you’ll spend time in the Power BI service or on the Power BI mobile app, viewing visuals and reports that have been created by others to help you and other stakeholders better understand the data and more effectively plan for future goals.
When you're viewing a dashboard or report, you can interact with it, but you can't change the size of the tiles or their arrangement. However, you can still learn a lot from the data analysis revealed.
Vena helps you get the most out of Power BI’s capabilities for financial reporting. Vena Insights, which uses embedded Power BI, enables new levels of business intelligence and empowers better decision making, giving you more opportunities to create visualizations and interactive reports from your Vena data.
This allows you to democratize your data and lets teams across the organization and beyond benefit from your insights.
“A lot of our customers want to know about their costs per order, average wage rates and how they’re tracking against the budget in their contract. All of these reports are automated in Vena and refreshed multiple times per day,” says Paolo Mari, VP of Business Analytics and Commercial Management for Metro Supply Chain Group (MSCG).
“The Power BI Connector lets us visualize and distribute our reports to anyone. Our customers can even go into Power BI and do their own analysis from our workspace.”
Combine the strength of Power BI with your existing financial and operational data through Vena Insights, which makes all your Vena data available in real time for intelligent reporting and analysis using embedded Power BI and Microsoft’s best-in-class AI and machine learning technology. All in a solution that’s easy to use, easy to scale and fast to adopt.
“The biggest thing we've been able to bring, is the simplicity of how we display the data. And it makes it much less threatening for people,” says Vena Insights user Darrell Rooney, Associate Vice President of Continuous Improvement and Finance for Saint Mary’s University.
Sounds pretty powerful, doesn’t it? So why are you still missing out on the insights of Power BI for financial reporting?
Start learning more about Power BI. Take the course Introduction to DAX Calculations with Power BI Desktop with Vena Academy.
Join Leo Lam, Senior Power BI Consultant at Vena to learn the fundamentals of DAX Calculations with Power BI Desktop.
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