What is PowerBI?
Power BI is a business intelligence tool specifically designed for data visualization that allows connection to various data sources in creating dynamic reports and dashboards. It allows managers to gain powerful insights from their data for better decision-making. The tool can connect to such data sources as databases, spreadsheets, flat files, and cloud services. It can retrieve data both from on-premises and cloud-based sources.
For data visualization and reporting, Power BI offers a wide range of features like interactive charts, graphs, and maps, amongst many others, for representing data and telling insightful stories. It allows users to customize the appearance, layout, and formatting of the visuals to create compelling reports and dashboards.
When it comes to data transformation and modeling, Power BI is very intuitive and offers robust features to clean and filter data, merging and shaping it however the user needs. It also supports creating relationships between different tables as you would do in regular SQL tables. You can create new columns, tables, formulas, and dimensions while leveraging powerful data analysis language such as DAX. It can perform aggregations, and use advanced analytics capabilities for forecasting, clustering, and anomaly detection.
When it comes to sharing all or a select number of reports, Power BI can do that too. Users can schedule reports and dashboards to be emailed on select day(s) and on a reoccurring basis at a specific time of day. Just prior to the emails being sent, users can ensure the data is automatically refreshed so that whoever is receiving the emailed visualizations, is seeing the latest and greatest performance data. Emails can be sent to all or select members of the organization or externally to clients. It also offers its native mobile apps for iOS and Android devices, allowing users to access and interact with reports and dashboards on the go.
Power BI for FP&A
When it comes to financial data, Power BI does allow users to leverage its powerful tools to generate balance sheets, income statements, cash flows, and many custom financial reports. In this sense, we can leverage Power BI in analyzing financial data by first connecting to any source system in order to import the relevant accounts for your financial statements.
Once the relevant financial data has been accessed, users can proceed to transform and shape that data using Power Query. Data can be cleansed, unnecessary columns removed, and relationships between tables accounts, customers, and transactions established prior to importing into Power BI.
For users with SQL and DAX experience, measures can be created for key financial metrics like revenue, expenses, profitability ratios, liquidity ratios, and growth rates. But in its basic form, users can simply bring together different data points that have already been imported, to give life to the analysis needed. Powerful supporting tools like filters, sliders, and drill-downs are used for complex analysis and insights.
Line charts or combo charts are typically used to trend and compare financial performance across different periods (e.g., monthly, quarterly, or yearly). Users quickly identify patterns and changes to revenue, expenses, or other financial metrics and can easily call out potential risks.
Since Power BI offers cube-like functionalities, users can create powerful profitability visualizations based on dimensions such as products, regions, and customer segments, to quickly identify high-profit vs low-profit areas.
Dynamic Cash Flow Statements can be created to monitor the changes in cash inflows or outflows using waterfall charts to identify drivers behind them. For budgeting and forecasting, Power BI has built-in functionality to generate projected values based on historical data.
In general, Power BI is a powerful tool for financial analysis that has the flexibility of what we are used to in MS Excel with its formulas, charts, and tables plus the strong data transformation and modeling capabilities of other tools such as multidimensional databases. Financial Planners are trending away from traditional spreadsheets and towards more dynamic, responsive, and robust tools that offer data-rich visualization that is easily shared across teams and organizations.
