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Creating An FP&A Reporting Ecosystem with Power BI Apps

Empowering your FP&A team and stakeholders with seamless collaboration, reporting, and analysis.

Summary

In this edition, we will be covering the following items:

  1. How to create a reporting and analytics ecosystem for FP&A

  2. What a robust Power BI ecosystem can do for your FP&A function

  3. The value of building a robust reporting ecosystem

Organized Chaos: Reporting & Analytics Without the Right Ecosystem

Without the right infrastructure in place, your team won’t be able to create centralized tools to help them succeed. Many teams continue to struggle with version control, access control, and repetitive analytical tasks:

  1. Multiple Versions: Multiple versions of reports exist in various locations (in multiple formats). No one is quite clear which is the latest version and what changes have been made. Teams waste time re-verifying that they are using the latest report or analytics (in Excel, PowerPoint, and other formats). We’ve all seen Excel files with names like, “Budget_2025_Final_Final_V6 (3).”

  2. Unclear Access Rules: With multiple file versions and locations, it’s also unclear who has access to what file. Your team can waste valuable time just trying to get access to a file, only to find out it wasn’t updated with the latest data.

  3. Analytics Work Has a Short Lifetime: Because there is no central repository of analytics tools, the team is regularly re-creating and updating old analysis (e.g., refreshing data sources for pivot tables and then taking screenshots of the updated numbers). This is fine for ad hoc analysis, but very quickly becomes tedious when it is the default analytics method for your team.

Creating A Self-Service Power BI Ecosystem for FP&A (and Beyond)

With the right tools, your team can empower themselves with a self-service “ecosystem” of reports using Power BI. The fundamentals you need to know are quite simple:

  1. Power BI Service: This is Power BI’s cloud offering. Power BI Service allows you to publish dashboards to a secure, central location on the web, where you can connect to live data and control access.

  2. Workspaces: Within Power BI Service, workspaces are essentially shared folders. You can control access and set up dashboard for different stakeholders and users using Workspaces.

  3. Reports, Dashboards, and RLS: Once you have your workspaces set up, you can now publish your reports and give people access. This allows you ensure your analytics work is “long-lived” and can be reused by the right stakeholders in the organization. Within dashboards, you can also setup even more granular access control, using row-level security (RLS).

  4. Power BI Apps: Finally, you can package and integrate suites of reports for your different stakeholders, so they can navigate between different reports in the shared ecosystem (Power BI Service and its Workspaces).

A Seamless Ecosystem: What Success Looks Like

Making the investment into your ecosystem can bring valuable returns. Your team can quickly start to reap the benefits of their hard work:

  1. Easy (Controllable) Access to Reporting: Dashboards are published to workspaces that are set up to support pre-defined stakeholders.

  2. Easy Version Control: The latest dashboards can be published to the shared workspaces (and older versions are archived) users can clearly identify which report they need to use and be confident that it is using the latest data (connected to live data sources).

  3. Expanding Analytics Capabilities: Because analytics work is reusable, the team invests in critical reporting once and then reuses it for the long-term. This empowers teams to focus on high-impact projects, rather than just trying to keep up with the (repetitive) reporting cadence.

  4. Unified Ecosystem: Power BI dashboards are packaged together into logical “apps” that give users the tools to tackle their analytics needs in one centralized place.

    1. Example: Your executive team uses the “Executive App” that contains high-level managerial dashboards focused on strategic goals, KPIs, and financial summaries. Your department leaders use an “Operations App” that focuses on more granular, operational data needed to make on-the-ground decisions on a day-to-day basis. Both apps can have different user experience designs to suit their different intended audiences.  

Your Quick-Start Guide to Crafting a Power BI Ecosystem

Successfully implementing your own Power BI Apps starts with answering the right questions:

  1. Define Analytics Problems to Be Solved: Your team’s first task is to identify the reports and analytics they want to serve their stakeholders with. You want clearly defined requirements and target audience for each stakeholder group.

  2. Define Stakeholder Groups: In Power BI Service, your team needs to create Workspaces that align to the user groups who will be consuming them.

    1. Examples:

      1. Executive Workspace

      2. Departmental Workspace

      3. Operations Workspace

      4. Accounting Workspace

      5. Treasury Workspace

  3. Define Security Needs: As you are setting up your workspaces (and deploying your dashboards), make sure to implement security to protect your dashboards (at the Workspace level) and your data (at the row level).

  4. Define Use Cases: With your dashboards published and secured, you can bow package them up into different use case-specific Power BI Apps (collections of reports tied together in one seamless user experience).

    1. Examples:

      1. Leadership MBR App

      2. Weekly S&Ops App

      3. Departmental MBR App

Tying It All Together

Having a thoughtfully designed reporting and analytics ecosystem unlocks your organization’s analytics capabilities. Building this infrastructure is your next step to enabling a data-driven culture within your FP&A team and beyond.

In the Next Newsletter

We will learn how FP&A teams can make sure their data is secure in Power BI.