Financial Reporting with Power BI Course
The syllabus is organised into a series of modules, each presented as a series of “challenges” – a specific requirement from your stakeholders or a task that you need to complete as part of your reporting solution. Through each challenge, you will have the opportunity to not just learn the features of Power BI, but will also be able to practice with interactive “try it out” exercises, quiz questions and downloadable templates In MS Word/Excel.
Each challenge consists of a number of micro-learning lessons and is expected to take circa 1-2 hours to complete You can come back and complete lessons over time though please ensure you allocate sufficient time to complete the exercises and activities in each lesson.
Click/Scroll across for the content in each module
Introduction
In the Introduction module we will look at the current situation (building Financial Statements with Excel), the Actuals/Budget dataset and the example solution we will end up with at the end of the course.
Content
Requirements and Data Model Design
Before you just load the data into Power BI, you need to think, somewhat obsessively, about the audience for it.
A report which is aimed at technical analysts who need to drill into details should be quite different to that aimed at an executive audience who perhaps just want high level numbers.
Once you know the audience, start with identifying the user stories/problem statements and the business questions that they need the report to answer.
Then define the calculations that you will need in order to answer them and design the data model – the tables of data behind the Power BI report – accordingly.
Lastly, you will need to consider how your audience will consume the report and what features, within both the report itself and the Power BI platform more generally, they will be expected to use.
Content
Data Ingestion, Shaping and Transformation
By completing this set of challenges, you will understand how to perform merge/join, append, group by and combine functions in Power Query.
Content
Content is only available in the full course.
Data Modelling and DAX
This set of challenges will involve creating a set of base measures for Actuals/Budget and key metrics such as Revenue, Gross Profit and Net Margin.
We will also look at “dynamically” formatting the calculations – e.g. depending on whether it is a percentage or currency value, and whether the Income Statement is showing consolidated values across multiple organisation units (in which case it will show values in reporting currency) or a single organisational unit (with values formatted according to the local currency e.g £ or €)
Content
Content is only available in the full course.
Data Visualisation
In this topic we will format the report with a background, colour theme and logo, we will add a waterfall chart for variance analysis and will add a page to analyse financial ratios to understand what is driving financial performance
Content
Content is only available in the full course.
Deployment, Sharing-Distribution and Security
In this module, we will look holistically at the Power BI environment and think about how we should organise our workspaces and the objects within them. We will also consider how the data assets that we have built can be re-used for other reports, as well as managing security and access.
Content
Content is only available in the full course.