From Data Overload to Better Business Decisions: Optimize Your BP&F with Power BI and Excel

Budgeting, planning, and forecasting (BP&F) is so much more than producing reports and spreadsheets — ‌it’s an essential part of the strategic decision-making process.

That requires clear communication of complex financial data to decision makers across the organization, as well as seamless collaboration with cross-functional teams.

Excel and Power BI are powerful, yet accessible tools to facilitate that communication, but even small mistakes with a dataset can become a major risk when integrated into cross-department Excel or Power BI forecasting models, which are then used to make business decisions.

We’re sharing five tips to help you avoid those pitfalls and successfully use Power BI and Excel for your BP&F efforts.

Understand How Your Data Is Managed, Updated, And Separated

BP&F depends on robust data management practices. This challenge can be even greater when you’re working in Excel, as it relies heavily on manual data management, manipulation, and visualization.

No matter how and where you’re managing your data, get as granular as possible with your understanding of your data models because flawed data will compromise your BP&F efforts from the start.

Define scenarios for ongoing data analysis and ad-hoc work. Validate your governance policies, too. Establish clear data ownership, document sources, and determine how you’ll perform regular validation checks.

Create Compelling Presentations with Smart Data Visualizations

BP&F outputs should be accessible to people across all departments, not just those with a deep financial background. Sales forecasting in Power BI should generate an output that the sales team can understand, for example.

A well-crafted visual representation can quickly convey complicated data. Gantt charts, for example, work well in project management and operational discussions. Choose a solution that makes this easy to create while allowing you to customize presentations and dashboards the way you need them.

Excel has some baseline functionality for common visuals and allows for rapid changes and experimentation. However, for longer-term issues and to better protect data, we recommend moving recurring analysis to a Power BI forecasting model. It separates dashboards from the back end. That way you protect and properly manage your data while making it easy to generate visuals.

Integrate Data From Multiple Sources

BP&F often needs to account for dozens, if not hundreds, of different data sources. Your tools must be able to support this complexity as you scale, including accounting and ERP systems, billing tools and CRMs, and more.

Modern standardization enables Power BI planning and forecasting to bring in many sources with minimal effort while ensuring data quality. That’s true for your business units or even when expanding across subsidiaries of large organizations. We’ve found that Microsoft Power BI greatly simplifies these processes.

The goal should be to create a unified model optimized for data analytics and planning across business functions. Prioritize automating these processes and integrations where you can.

Maintain a Clear Audit Trail

A clear audit trail is essential when building on integration and visualizations. This is crucial for any system with real-time requirements, not just forecasting with Power BI and similar tools.

What’s good about using a Power BI forecasting model is that the system recognizes the importance of having up-to-date information. It offers capabilities for continuous data refresh, while still tracking changes to information and models. You can have multiple teams work on forecasts, dashboards, and other visualizations without directly impacting the underlying data.

This Power BI functionality limits the chance of accidental changes. It also tracks updates on a per-user basis. Excel and other spreadsheet tools make it notoriously difficult to uncover potentially harmful changes to your formulas or who made them.

More importantly, real-time data updates are indispensable for year-end audits. They offer auditors a comprehensive view of the company’s financial journey. This simplifies the reconciliation process and enhances the accuracy of financial statements. Reliable, up-to-date information builds confidence in an organization’s financial reporting practices and fosters trust among stakeholders.

Embrace AI/ML to Enhance Data Models

New AI offerings are being released constantly, and they can play a role in supporting data-driven decisions in BP&F if used carefully. We typically see three areas where AI makes the most sense:

• Creation. Build a model for planning because machine learning can take multiple factors into account. These can include current economic environment, historical trends, and even elements like weather forecasts.
• Analysis and adaptation. Use AI to monitor forecasts to see if factors are having the influence you expect. Then adapt your plan based on how you’re changing forecasts. It tells you if changes are in the environment or in your results.
• Prescriptive action. While other steps give an initial assessment of how changes impact your plan, these AI use cases help you take prescriptive action. They can determine what you should do in the real world to achieve a plan.

As with other areas of finance and operations, a clear audit trail is essential when using AI/ML in planning. It ensures accountability and transparency into financial models and forecasts, while supporting confident decision-making. This is key in seeing how a result came to be and referring back to it in more detail, diving into that element to better understand and validate it.

Putting It All Together

Power BI forecasting and modeling can greatly improve accuracy and efficiency, but it requires careful planning and attention to detail. From understanding how forecasting data is managed to leveraging AI for more sophisticated forecasting, every effort requires a high-quality team, smart technology, and a robust audit trail.

Remember that successful BP&F isn’t just about data collection — it’s about how you structure, visualize, and update that data. Tools like Power BI simplify the integration of multiple data sources and offer real-time updates. This ensures your financial models remain accurate and actionable.

With Acterys, you can have it all in one solution. Get the familiarity of Excel and the advanced features of Power BI with Smart XL. Learn more and book your personalized demo to see Smart XL in action.