Successful planning, budgeting, and forecasting requires having the right strategy and tools to process and analyze vast amounts of data. That’s why Microsoft is constantly updating and expanding features of Power BI.
Learn about recent platform updates that help financial professionals uncover insights quickly and efficiently. Plus, find out how to maximize your planning, budgeting, and forecasting processes with a unified approach to data and analytics.
Microsoft Power BI has added several features that help companies with financial planning and analysis (FP&A). Some updates are small, usually focusing on specific use cases or improving the user experience. One example is Power BI’s ability to balance user queries with query scale-out, speeding up query response times for high user-concurrency workloads.
Other updates to Power BI create advanced functionality, add integrations, or offer new ways to streamline financial operations. Here are three of Power BI’s new features and updates.
Datamarts are self-service analytics solutions that provide a simple, no-code experience for storing and exploring data in a fully managed database. Datamarts give business users in accounting and finance the ability to build their own data models and collections. They can then self-serve business questions and answers through T-SQL and visual query experiences. Businesses can centralize small to moderate data volumes, reducing the infrastructure required for self-service solutions.
Datamarts support relational database analytics with Power BI by providing access to data using external SQL clients. Datamarts also facilitate the creation of end-to-end semantic models, empowering Power BI creators to build comprehensive solutions without relying on IT teams.
Power BI has introduced dynamic format strings for measures, allowing users to format measures based on slicer selections, measure values, or other conditional criteria. This feature leverages data analysis expressions (DAX) expressions to determine which format string should apply to a measure.
Using dynamic format strings lets users maintain the measure as a numeric data type while still applying conditional formatting. The result is accurate, visually appealing representations of financial data.
Power BI Desktop now includes a DAX query view, which allows users to write, edit, and view the results of DAX queries directly within the application. With the DAX query view, financial professionals can efficiently analyze and manipulate data to support their planning, budgeting, and forecasting processes.
This feature eliminates the need to switch between Power BI Desktop and other tools when working with semantic models. The DAX query view provides a range of productivity-enhancing capabilities, a measure authoring workflow, and the ability to investigate DAX queries used by visuals through the Performance Analyzer pane.
Other Power BI updates are more substantial and could transform your business processes. The introduction of Microsoft Fabric and Copilot in Power BI, for example, offers a human-centered analytics tool that combines Azure Synapse and Azure Data Factory in one unified SaaS platform.
Copilot is among the most significant advancements for Power BI Premium and Power BI Pro users, which transforms how users query data and create dashboards. Copilot uses artificial intelligence (AI) to provide intelligent suggestions and recommendations, making the process of querying data faster, more intuitive, and more efficient.
With Copilot, users can effortlessly explore and analyze data for insights that drive better planning, budgeting, and forecasting decisions. Users can ask natural language questions, such as “What was my revenue this year?” or “What is my revenue forecast for the next quarter?” Copilot performs data processing and analysis in the background while delivering accurate, relevant, and real-time answers.
Copilot also creates comprehensive business intelligence reports and dashboards. Simply provide a dataset and specify the metrics or custom visualizations. This feature saves time and effort for Power BI users who no longer need to manually design and build dashboards.
For example, users can instruct Copilot to build a report that shows trailing sales metrics. They could also ask Copilot to create a KPI card displaying the percentage increase in sales from the prior month. This level of interactivity and customization improves the user experience and provides deeper insights into financial data.
Soon, Copilot will also be able to write-back data, allowing users to make updates and simulate potential future scenarios. Real-time data and what-if analyses will be possible as part of planning, budgeting, and forecasting.
Power BI seamlessly integrates with Office 365, providing organizations with improved collaboration and communication capabilities for their planning, budgeting, and forecasting processes. This integration allows Power BI users to easily share reports, dashboards, and insights with their colleagues. This improves information-sharing and encourages a collaborative environment.
With the Power BI app integrated into Microsoft Teams, users can embed interactive reports directly into Teams channels and chats using a Power BI tab. Team members can share and discuss relevant data as part of their ongoing conversations, which promotes collaboration and improves decision-making. Additionally, when users paste links to reports, dashboards, and apps in Teams, a link preview is automatically created in the message box. This makes it easy for team members to access and engage with shared content.
The integration also allows users to chat directly from the Power BI service. Users can share filtered views of financial reports and dashboards with teammates and jump-start conversations around the data. Combining Power BI and Teams helps organizations align stakeholders, improve communication, and streamline decision-making.
Power BI’s low-code approach reduces the barrier to entry, allowing more users to access and interpret financial data. Integrating Power BI with Microsoft tools such as Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams improves productivity by connecting tools your employees already use. The consistent ribbon interface across these applications ensures a smooth transition and minimizes the need for users to learn multiple tools.
Just as Apple created an ecosystem around devices, Microsoft aims to provide a unified experience across different platforms. Power BI plays a crucial role in this vision by consolidating data into a single source of truth for everyone in the organization. This eliminates data silos, unifies workflows, fosters collaboration, and streamlines workflows.
Integrating AI capabilities further improves productivity by automating repetitive tasks and providing intelligent insights. Inside Power BI, Copilot lets users leverage AI to perform complex data analysis and modeling in less time and with more certainty.
However, to truly unlock the full potential of Power BI for FP&A, businesses need a collaborative write-back component that seamlessly integrates with Power BI. This is where Acterys comes in, serving as the final step in the process and empowering businesses to combine FP&A and Power BI. It acts as the bridge between Power BI and the ability to simulate potential scenarios using your data.
By combining Copilot and Acterys, users can seamlessly change and collect data from various sources while maintaining a single source of truth. This unified environment eliminates the need for users to learn multiple tools, saving valuable resources and streamlining workflows across the organization.
For example, consider a retail company forecasting sales for the upcoming year. With Power BI and Acterys, the company can gather historical sales data, market trends, and other relevant information. Using Copilot, the retailer can use natural language to query the data for insights into past performance. Acterys takes the workflow the extra mile and allows the company to run multiple scenarios, such as changes in pricing strategies, marketing campaigns, or economic conditions. By inputting these variables into Acterys, the company can generate forecasts and analyze the potential impact on sales in real time.
Seamless integration between Power BI and Acterys ensures that any changes made in Acterys are reflected in Power BI dashboards and reports, maintaining data consistency and accuracy. This integration goes beyond just financial reporting capabilities. While Power BI provides robust financial reporting out of the box, when combined with Acterys, it offers a comprehensive solution for financial planning, reporting, and analytics. No longer does your company need to rely on manual data transfers or reconcile data between different tools. Your people save time and reduce the likelihood of errors.
Organizations can struggle to manage the sheer number of applications and systems in use. AI only makes it more difficult to view the organization holistically and make smart, strategic decisions.
For example, marketing, sales, and support teams may each use AI models and tools that don’t communicate with each other. This lack of integration and collaboration limits your ability to analyze marketing’s impact on sales and vice versa.
Microsoft recognizes the importance of a unified approach and aims to bring together disparate systems while empowering you to use AI strategically. By consolidating data and tools on a single platform, organizations can achieve economies of scale, reduce maintenance efforts, and optimize resource allocation.
These new features of Power BI, including Copilot, empower financial users to effortlessly query data, create interactive dashboards, and gain valuable insights that drive decision-making. Power BI’s integration with Office 365 and Microsoft Teams enables smooth collaboration and communication that saves time and reduces duplicate work and confusion. Seamlessly integrating the power of Acterys creates a unified environment that saves time and resources while driving better planning, budgeting, and forecasting decisions.
Still using Excel for your planning, budgeting, and forecasting? With Acterys, you don’t have to choose between the new features of Power BI or the more familiar Excel. Get smart about your data with Acterys Smart XL.
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