Power Platform Finance
Power Platform Finance

Power BI for Financial Data

What We Cover:

  • Designing and building data models that align with stakeholder requirements
  • Importing and transforming data from multiple sources into the right structure for analysis in Power BI
  • Leveraging DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) to create financial metrics such as revenue, profit, and margin, as well as time-based calculations like YTD and MTD.
  • Using Power BI’s visual and interactive capabilities to analyze and present variances between actuals, budgets, and prior year figures, helping stakeholders understand key financial drivers.

Learning Outcomes:

Using a realistic accounting dataset, this course empowers you to automate your month-end reports using the built-in data transformation, logic and visualisation capabilities of Power BI. 

You will be able to generate powerful insights on financial performance all without the manual effort of continually producing different cuts of data/pieces of analysis.

Upon completion, participants will confidently create engaging reports, turn data into actionable insights, and build strong cross-functional relationships, driving better decision-making.

Business Benefits:

Significant time savings by automating month-end reporting and enabling users to self-serve on financial data, reducing reliance on finance analysts to manually produce reports and analysis each month. This leads to more efficient processes and faster decision-making.

Note that this e-learning course can be hosted in any Learning Management system and customised to your company. Please let us know if this is something you're interested in!

Click/Scroll across for the content in each module

Module 1: Structuring Financial Data for Effective Analysis

  • Power BI isn’t there to “make data look pretty” but rather to deliver specific insights and answer specific business questions from the intended user base. So the starting point for analytics is to identify the audience, their questions, associated logic and “slice and dice” attributes that are required to deliver those insights. This is a non-technical exercise focused around gathering requirements and conceptually designing a semantic model that will form the foundation of your reporting and modelling solutions.
  • You will come away from this module with an approach and templates (which you can immediately use for your own use cases!) to capture stakeholder requirements for report and translate these into a data structure (semantic model) required for Power BI.

Content

Module 1 Topic 1: Requirements Gathering and Scoping
Module 1 Topic 2: Defining the Data Structure
Module 1 Topic 3: Logical Model Design

Module 2: Transforming Financial Data for Reporting in Power Query

  • Description: Our data model design from the previous session has provided a blueprint for how we need to shape our data into the right structure.   This is done through a sequence of activities known as j/ Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) – bringing data into Power BI from data source(s), cleaning and shaping that data as required, and loading it into a Power BI data model. In this course our data source is Excel/CSV files with some specific data cleaning activities (e.g. header rows in each of our actuals files, dates potentially in a different format to our machine locale) and transformation activities (e.g. calculating amounts in Reporting currency given local currency amounts/a separate table of exchange rates).
    • Outcome: After this  you will know how to ingest data from a Teams Channel (SharePoint) in Power Query and create a sequence of queries to shape and clean data (without writing any code!)  and embed logic for currency conversion.

Content

Module 2 Topic 1: Ingesting and combining Actuals Data
Module 2 Topic 2: Calculating Reporting Currency Amounts
Module 2 Topic 3: Calculating Monthly Level Budget Reporting

Module 3: Mastering DAX for Financial Metrics and Time Intelligence

  • Description: Now that we have our data loaded into Power BI, we need to create the table relationships and a set of base measures for Actuals/Budget and key metrics such as Revenue, Gross Profit and Net Margin. We will also leverage time intelligence to show MTD, QTD or YTD values depending on a slicer selection.
    • Outcome: After this module you will know how to write measures in DAX, including understand the power of time intelligence to create dynamic calculations

Content

Module 3 Topic 1: Creating table relationships and core budget/actual measure
Module 3 Topic 2: Creating Budget, Variance and Margin measures
Module 3 Topic 3: DAX Time intelligence

Module 4: Visualizing Financial Performance – Variance and Trend Analysis

  • Description: Data visualisation is all about drawing the attention of your audience to what is important – providing the right context to the numbers so that they can quickly evaluate performance and what is driving it. Variance analysis – e.g. highlighting and explaining variances from actuals to budget or Prior year - is the cornerstone of understanding financial performance and becomes very powerful in Power BI through visualisations that enable “slice and dice” capability.
    • Outcome: By the end of this module, you will build a basic Power BI report page that is formatted with corporate colours/a logo and which allows a report consumer to see variances to budget and Prior year through KPI cards, a line chart and bar graph, utilising the cross-filtering capabilities of Power BI to understand what is driving them.

Content

Module 4 Topic 1: Formatting the report page and the Income Statement Matrix
Module 4 Topic 2: Creating KPI Cards to show core metrics/ratios
Module 4 Topic 3: Creating other Visuals for Variance Analysis