Power BI is fantastic at consuming volumes of data quickly and producing great visuals for the classic data model with product sales and costs over time by customer and geography. But has anyone out there tried to produce a set of management accounts in Power BI? Googling this reveals it is one of the most challenging aspects of Power BI.
In this data driven world it is important that senior finance staff manage the production of information quickly and accurately. This enables them to spend more time running a business rather than administering it.
At BiNavigation we have developed a template Power BI app which will generate a set of accounts including Income Statements, Balance sheet and Cashflow from trial balance/general ledger history,
The App includes a whole toolset of visuals highlighting current and historic financial results:
- MTD and YTD actuals with budget and last year variances.
- Monthly, quarterly, half yearly and yearly history.
- Comparison of current month, quarter, or half year with corresponding historic period.
- Business KPIs including percentages and per unit amounts.
- Round currency, thousands, millions.
- Key Driver summaries.
- Other general ledger sourced information, for example ONS amounts, insurance renewal data.
- Drill down to see composition of numbers by site or department with full formatting.
- Drill through to see alternative presentations of the financials.
- Summary dashboard.
- Multiple users and limitation of what can be seen by users.
Many modern ledger systems offer some form of totaling template, but they tend to be difficult to administer, lack KPI production and decent formatting, and with large general ledgers can lack speed. Older ledger systems require some form of export to Excel anyway. So it would be just as easy to export to Power BI.
Historically, the software to generate this kind of information was cost prohibitive for many organisations, leaving them with slow Excel based solutions. Whilst Power BI licences are affordable to most businesses, the time and skill required to generate a fast working data model can make such a project expensive, even if only in development time.
So, let BiNavigation take the heat out of that development and help you produce and publish your accounts quickly. Contact us and we will take you through our demonstration model and discuss next steps.