Why You Need Power BI for FP&A

Summary

Welcome to the FP&Automation newsletter.

In this newsletter, we will be going over the following items:

1. The four big operational challenges FP&A teams face

2. How Power BI can help you solve these challenges

3. Lay the groundwork for continued learning

Challenges of Modern FP&A

FP&A teams face four key operational challenges that take up their time and prevent them from doing their best work:

1. No Central Source of Truth: Lacking a central source of truth can lead to conflicting reports and make it difficult to perform meaningful, actionable analytics.

2. Repetitive, Manual Tasks: Time-consuming and error-prone manual tasks cause FP&A teams to spend more time reconciling and cleaning data and less time analyzing it.

3. Lacking Analytics Tooling: Lack of BI tooling makes it difficult to extract meaningful insights – many reports are manually-generated and struggle to provide in-depth insight.

4. Lack of Controls and Complex Workflow: Lack of built-in controls and workflow means that teams spend too much time trying to keep up with the process and not enough time driving their key results

Power BI as a Solution for Modern FP&A

Intelligently leveraging Power BI unlocks new capabilities for an FP&A organization that go a long way towards solving the core issues outlined above:

1. Create Your Own Central Source of Truth: Power BI, in conjunction with other tools, can be used to provide your team and your leadership with a central source of truth for all reporting, planning, variance analysis, and analytics.

2. Streamline Manual Tasks: Power BI can be used to automate (and thoroughly enhance) repetitive data manipulation and analysis tasks.

3. Power BI is the BI Tool Built for Excel Users: Power BI is built to be intuitive for strong Excel users – while still providing users with advanced analytics capabilities

4. Implement Controls and Workflow for FP&A: Power BI can be used as an integrated planning tool – complete with streamlined workflow, controls, security, and approvals.

Painting a Picture of Modern FP&A with Power BI:

In the coming editions of this newsletter, we will guide you, step-by-step, through how to tackle your biggest problems in FP&A. By the end, you will have a clear picture of the roadmap ahead, why it is a valuable investment of your team’s resources, and what the benefits will be.

In the Next Newsletter

We will learn how and why to treat Power BI as a central source of truth for FP&A work.