Have you considered trying to get all of your clients on board with adhering to IBCS standards for financial reporting?:
This aims to solve exactly the problem you bring up. I’ve become a big fan of this approach as I think it produces extremely clear and easy-to-understand reports while simultaneously reducing development time and the inefficiencies inherent in producing the same product in inconsistent ways for different clients. I would recommend a number of resources to you:
This is the “bible” of IBCS, in the same way that the Definitive Guide… is for DAX. It looks dry, but is actually a beautiful and highly readable book.
Zebra BI visuals - if your organization permits the use of custom visuals, the IBCS-compliant Zebra BI Charts and Zebra BI Tables visuals are as good as it gets. Allows you to quickly and easily produce beautiful financial reports consistent with IBCS standards. The tooltips on my Data Challenge 16 entry are done entirely using Zebra BI visuals, and I think they provide an astonishing amount of information in a clear and easy to understand way. They are also incredibly well-documented on YouTube and on the Zebra BI Blog.
This podcast that Lars Schrieber did with Andrej Lapagne, the founder and CEO of Zebra BI about the IBCS standards. Really thought-provoking interview that first introduced me to IBCS.
I hope this is helpful. If you do take a look at this approach, please let me know what you think of it.
One other thought. In addition to the Zebra BI visuals, the new InfoRiver custom visual foR P&L and other financial reports is getting a lot of good reviews:
List item
I don’t know this visual as well as the Zebra BI visuals, but I was part of the beta test group and was very impressed with its capabilities and ease of use.
Hello @Ezenunez, just following up if the response from @BrianJ help you solve your inquiry?
We’ve noticed that no response has been received from you since November 4. In case there won’t be any activity on it in the next few days, we’ll be tagging this post as Solved.
In my former job as Finance Director for 10 motor dealerships, I spend quite some time putting a decent Power BI Management Accounting system in play (Balance sheets, Profit and Loss, Cashflow) for multiple sites and departments. End result was fantastic thanks to the help I got from @BrianJ and others at EDNA.
I am a big fan of the Profitbase Financial Reporting matrix. It comes as a free and a paid version, but have never had reason to use the paid version.
Inforiver is new on the market and I have had a quick look and looks pretty smart but to my knowledge it does cost.
I looked at Zebra too and had a conversation with them about future dev for financials. Things may have moved on but at that time formatting individual rows as % or 2dp whilst leaving the majority of the rows as 0dp was not possible. However the visuals are just fantastic.
All three visuals enable you to reduce your DAX coding by slotting in rows that are not in the main table and performing the necessary calculation. This is a blessing and a curse. This is fine if the report is not going to change very much over time, but will leave you re-doing those rows if you accidentally delete anything. Equally if you are using the PBIX to perform an adhoc extract, you will need to reperform all the calculations in the adhoc report.
There will always be a consumer of financial data who requires a pdf or excel doc. With Paginated reports and Analyse in excel, this is fairly easy to achieve, but only if the rows discussed above are DAX coded into the model.
In my opinion it would be better to work through the calculations, percentages etc in DAX. Then they are always there in your reports without the need for constant dev of the calcs you’ve already performed. Tough at the outset this one, but huge benefits longterm.
Thanks Brian and Pete for you insight and sugestions. Very much appreciate it.
As this is the first release of the Financials in Power BI, I am thinking in create a simpler model (which is better of what they have now) and look at those alternatives as I am getting feedback from our clients.
It is great to see those solution out there, specialy if you work with one client at the the time. You can create a a big impact!
My report will be share with mutiple clients, so I might need to keep it a bit simpler for now.
