Show Me the Money: Dynamic Revenue Planning in Power BI & Acterys

Summary

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

1. A high-level overview of the roadmap to building revenue planning solutions in Power BI

2. Guiding principles for creating solutions that empower your teams and drive results and accountability

Revenue Planning is Critical to Survival – Plan Accordingly

Having a robust revenue planning model is the foundation for the rest of your P&L forecast. Your organization needs a clear picture of the “top line” in place to form an accurate picture of the future and support the organization’s growth. Building centralized, configurable tooling that completely captures your company’s revenue model, unit economics, and key drivers will help your finance team and business partners plan for the future.

1. Start with Your Revenue Drivers: There are countless possible revenue models, but the critical task in building a world-class FP&A solution for revenue planning is to identify and define your revenue drivers. These will give your business teams clear “inputs” that can be used to test assumptions, perform what-if analysis, and fine-tune forecasts/budgets. Acterys and Power BI can then perform the “output” calculations to produce your revenue plan:

   1. Volume * Price = Sales

   2. (Starting Licenses - Churn + New Licenses) * Price = ARR

   3. Hours * Rate = Service Sales

2. Bake in Your Unit Economics: Taking this concept one step further, we can include inputs around the associate costs of delivering our products and services to market (COGS/COS). This empowers business teams to make explicit assumptions about the unit economics of the business—assumptions that can be pressure tested against actuals in a variance analysis report. This is an incredibly valuable planning tool that can help your team assess the financial health of your business units.

3. Get Finance and Business Partners on the Same Page: With a centralized Power BI dashboard for planning, reporting, and variance analysis you empower your organization with two distinct advantages:

   1. Support & Leadership: Business partners, leadership, and finance are using the same single source of truth, with the same driving assumptions, and the same data. The three parties can now work together to drive performance, analyze trends, and course-correct in real-time.

   2. Accountability & Transparency: All stakeholders have clearly define goals, with clearly defined assumptions of how to get there. This centralized tooling and process enforces transparency, but also empowers business partners with data and metrics to support their needs and facilitate their collaboration with leadership and within their individual teams.

4. Support In-Depth Variance Analysis: When your teams have clearly defined “input” variables and then have actual results to compare them with, variance analysis becomes much more powerful. Your organization is now equipped to answer the “why” behind the “what.” When teams outperform or underperform goals, it becomes easier to work together to identify root causes, look for patterns across the organization, and re-leverage learning and insights across teams.

People-Focused Tooling Supports Results-Focused Teams

Creating valuable FP&A tools (or any business application) is always a people-first task. When your team tackles projects with your business partners, stakeholders, and leadership in mind, your organization can create best-in-class solutions that empower your teams and support a high-performance culture. The below guidelines are simple but effective reminders for approaching your revenue planning solution (and any other FP&A application):

1. Give business partners the tools they need to build robust revenue plans

2. Use Power BI and Acterys to streamline, consolidate, and centralize tooling across the organization

3. Give finance and leadership the insights they need to drive in-depth analysis

4. Create “structured flexibility” in the tooling to support different teams’ needs but provide standardization across the organization

5. Empower your teams to deep dive into variance analysis and uncover root causes (for both outperforming and underperforming)

   a. Leverage these insights to drive results

In the Next Newsletter

We will deep dive into how business logic is configured in Acterys and Power BI and unveil some of the “secret sauce” to building FP&A applications with these technologies.