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Financial reporting plays a crucial role in enabling organizations to make informed decisions. Yet for many businesses, this process is fraught with challenges such as disjointed systems, lack of real-time updates, and inefficient workflows.
Microsoft Power BI addresses these challenges with its robust tools for data integration, modeling, and visualization, transforming financial data into valuable insights. For businesses with complex financial reporting needs, pairing Power BI with Acterys enhances these capabilities by introducing advanced automation, seamless customization, and greater efficiency—empowering organizations to make smarter, faster decisions.
What Is Financial Reporting in Power BI?
Financial reporting in Power BI involves leveraging its business intelligence capabilities to transform raw financial data into meaningful insights. The platform allows organizations to visualize key financial metrics like balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow statements through interactive dashboards and tailored reports. By integrating multiple data sources, defining data models, and enabling real-time updates, Power BI can enhance the financial reporting process for businesses of all sizes.
Power BI Financial Reporting Capabilities
Power BI is primarily known for its data visualization and business intelligence (BI) capabilities. However, it’s also a powerful platform for financial reporting when used strategically. Power BI financial reporting provides a wealth of tools and features to ensure comprehensive and accurate financial analysis:
Data Integration
With Power BI, you can effortlessly gather financial data from different departments, systems, and platforms. Power BI simplifies the financial reporting process by connecting to various data sources such as Excel, SQL Server, SAP HANA, and cloud platforms. This ensures your financial data is up-to-date, unified, and ready for analysis.
Data Modeling
You need to transform raw data into a structured format before you can create meaningful financial reports. Power BI’s data modeling capabilities enable you to shape, clean and enhance your data. Define relationships, create calculated columns, and ensure consistency across financial reports for accurate insights.
Data Visualization
Power BI offers extensive visualization options, including tables, charts, and graphs, allowing businesses to create visually engaging financial reports. Whether it’s income statements, balance sheets, or cash flow statements, Power BI ensures clarity and precision.
Interactive Dashboards
Interactive Power BI dashboards enable users to drill down into specific details, apply filters, and explore trends, providing a deeper understanding of financial health. This interactivity empowers decision-makers to ask questions and gain deeper insights into the organization’s financial health.
Custom Calculations
Using Power BI’s DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) language allows you to create custom measures and formulas. Power BI gives you the flexibility to define these formulas for when you need to calculate profitability ratios, growth rates or any other financial metrics.
Collaboration and Sharing
Power BI enables secure sharing and collaboration on financial reports. You can also share reports securely with stakeholders inside and outside your organization. This ensures that the right people — and only the right people — can review and collaborate in real time.
Streamlining Financial Reporting with Power BI
While Power BI is a powerful tool, managing financial reporting with its default features can present challenges.
- Version Control: Power BI offers some support for collaboration, but having multiple users trying to view or modify the same report simultaneously creates risks, including confusion and version control issues.
- Formatting: Default visuals don’t necessarily offer the features needed to properly format financial statements, such as under/over lines, parentheses, scaling or percentage formatting.
- Calculations: Power BI can be challenging for creating custom rows, column calculations and subtotals that are needed for an income statement or balance sheet.
- Write-Back: Writing back to the data source isn’t a default option, as Power BI doesn’t provide the necessary features to facilitate this process.
These issues can make it difficult to find visuals that offer the look and feel of a professional financial report. However, with the right approach and supplementary tools, these hurdles can be overcome.
Integrate Data Sources
Power BI connects seamlessly with a range of on-premises and cloud-based data sources. The platform supports on-premises and cloud-based data sources, such as SQL Server, Oracle, SAP HANA, Azure Analysis Services and Azure Blob Storage. Power BI also supports a variety of third-party data sources, such as Salesforce, Dynamics CRM and QuickBooks.
For solutions that require complex financial reporting, Acterys provides an additional layer of support. Acterys supports a range of source systems, including NetSuite, QuickBooks and Xero.
Creating Financial Statements
Creating income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow reports directly in Power BI can be complex due to its lack of predefined templates. Acterys offers customizable financial reporting templates tailored for these needs, ensuring professional formatting and structure.
Edit and Manage Financial Models
By combining Power BI with Acterys, you can automate data models, enabling rapid adjustments and scalable planning. Acterys provides data model automation and enterprise-grade planning capabilities that enable you to create and edit profit and loss statements, balance sheets, cash-flow statements and more with ease in Power BI. This makes it simple to manage unlimited scenarios with different drivers, compare actual and forecast values across financial statements, and much more.
Enhance Collaboration
Power BI’s collaboration tools are bolstered by Acterys’ features like row-based comments and write-back capabilities, enabling real-time updates and seamless team coordination.
Why Combine Power BI with Acterys?
By combining Power BI’s visualization and analytics capabilities with Acterys’ advanced financial reporting tools, you can unlock unparalleled efficiency in your financial reporting process.
- Professional Formatting: Ensure precise formatting for financial statements, including under/over lines, special characters, and parenthesis.
- Dynamic Analysis: Easily switch between relative and absolute displays and visualize variances for better financial health analysis.
- Write-Back Capabilities: Update data sources directly from Power BI, streamlining forecasting and planning.
- Tailored Visuals: Use Acterys’ custom visuals for intuitive financial reporting aligned with International Business Communication Standards.
Acterys can help you simplify tasks such as creating profit and loss statements, forecasting cash flows, and managing budgets. By integrating seamlessly with Power BI and Excel, Acterys enables your organization to automate complex financial models, create data-driven Power BI reports, and streamline the financial reporting process.
When you use Acterys Reporting, you get access to Power BI financial reporting templates including:
- Cash-Flow Forecasting: Get a holistic view of how cash flows in and out of your business. Make more accurate cash flow forecasts that improve working capital and confidently align cash-flow projections with long-term investments.
- Budget Planning: Create detailed budgets for each expense category, compare budgeted outcomes versus actuals, and monitor spending over time.
- Annual Financial Reports: Develop comprehensive financial statements such as profit and loss statements, balance sheets, and cash flows quickly and easily.
- Performance Planning and Forecasting: Create integrated plans to align the entire organization with the business strategy and project future performance with confidence.
Take Your Power BI Financial Reporting to the Next Level
Power BI offers exceptional financial reporting tools, but its true potential is unlocked when paired with Acterys. From intuitive dashboards to customizable financial statements, Acterys transforms your financial reporting process, helping you focus on insights that drive growth.
Ready to optimize your financial reporting with Power BI and Acterys? Request a demo today and discover how you can streamline planning, reporting, and analysis with ease.
