With its range of rich and interactive dashboards for business users, Power BI is enabling them to make data-powered business decisions through business intelligence. The Power BI suite of analytical tools provides accurate business insight across multiple organizational functions including finance and accounting.

Thanks to its in-built flexibility, Power BI users can integrate their data with the Microsoft Dynamics 365 suite of products for finance and operations. Using Dynamics 365, Power BI users can directly access Power BI reports and even personalize their workspace.

As a business user, you can implement a financial operations dashboard in Power BI that can display visualized data from cost management and financial accounting.

What can be the typical components of a financial operations dashboard in Power BI? And what are its key benefits?

Let’s answer these questions in the remaining sections of this article.

What is a Power BI dashboard in financial operations?

A Power BI dashboard in financial operations allows you to monitor and track each of your finance-related KPIs or metrics. How does this help? The financial operations dashboard in Power BI allows you to:

• Implement better cost and cash management strategies.
• Track your business expenses and sales revenue.
• Provide a daily overview of the cash flow in your business and your liquidity status.
• Track the status of your account payables and account receivables so as to complete all the outstanding payments (due from your clients) and owed payments (to your business vendors and partners).
• Achieve the financial goals of your company.

Here is an example of a Power BI cost management dashboard.

In the next section, we shall discuss how a Power BI dashboard can be used for effective cost management in any business enterprise.

How a Power Bi dashboard Can Be Used in Cost Management

The Power BI Cost Management dashboard is useful for inventory handling personnel or individuals responsible for inventory management. This includes tasks like handling the cost variances of the inventory stocks or daily cash flows. As a financial decision-maker, you can gain valuable insights such as the inventory stock levels, work-in-progress (or WIP) items, turnover ratio, and the cost of inventory.

The Cost management dashboard in Power BI primarily displays the following workspaces, namely:

Cost Administration

that contains the following tabs:

• Overview tab showing the overall application data.
• Inventory Accounting Status tab showing data such as the inventory overview (opening balance, turnover ratio, and on-hand inventory days), inventory statement, and site- and item-wise inventory overview (inventory accuracy by site, the turnover ratio by site, and inventory ending balance by site or item).
• Manufacturing Accounting Status tab showing data such as the WIP overview (opening balance, WIP turnover ratio, and site-wise balance), WIP statement, and site-wise WIP statement (opening and ending balance, category- or site-wise WIP statement).

Cost Analysis

That contains the following tabs:

Overview tab showing the overall application data.

• Inventory Accounting Analysis tab showing inventory details (including top 10 resources by ending balance, inventory turnover ratio, and low accuracy), ABC classification (consumed material, inventory ending balance), and inventory trends (in inventory ending balance, net change, and turnover ratio).
• Manufacturing Accounting Analysis tab showing WIP trends including WIP ending balance, net change, and turnover ratio.
• Standard Cost Variance Analysis tab showing purchase price variance (including procured balance, price variance ratio, and variance by site/ item group), production variance (manufacturing cost, production variance ratio, and variance by site/ item group).

With such a financial operations dashboard in Power BI, you can validate financial numbers with more insight and delve deeper into the financial details of your company. This, in turn, can improve productivity and enable better financial planning in the future.

Next, we shall look at some of the components of a Power BI dashboard that make it so valuable.

Components of a Power Bi dashboard for Financial Operations

Along with being real-time and interactive, financial operations dashboard in Power BI includes a number of components such as:

Account receivables and payables

Power BI dashboards provide a visualized form of account receivables and payables. The account receivables component displays all the business debtors based on the business unit.

Additionally, it can show the aging details for pending receivables along with the overall data trend of sales outstanding in the current and previous year. Account payables show similar data points for the business vendors.

Here is an example of a Power BI accounting dashboard.

Sales revenue

Typically, this shows the generated business revenue from each business unit along with the revenue graph for a selected number of consecutive years. Here is an example of a Power BI revenue dashboard.

Business expense

This component provides an overview of the business expenses. It can contain a list of the expenses of all business vendors with a comparison of their current and previous year expenses. Other types can contain a comparison of the actual versus the budgeted expenses for a business unit or group.

Here is an example of a Power BI expense dashboard.

Key Benefits of a Power Bi dashboard for Financial Operations

A financial operations dashboard in Power BI is beneficial in rendering key pieces of financial data in the graphical or visualized format. A Power BI dashboard data is easier to interpret by finance experts and to be shared with other business stakeholders.

Let’s take a look at some of the key benefits of a finance dashboard created using Power BI:

Data visualization

Power BI dashboards implement data visualization that is a proven technique of understanding and analyzing finance-related KPIs and metrics. Through efficient visual representation, financial analysts can process even complex data and arrive at better decisions. This is a more reliable mode than going through multiple Excel spreadsheets.

Enhances clarity and productivity

Most finance experts spend considerable time and budget analyzing data from multiple sources of varying types. The financial dashboard in Power BI works for multiple data sources and integrates the data components for enhanced clarity and insights. This not only saves time but also enhances productivity in finance teams.

Detect any problem areas and devise the right intervention.

Financial dashboards present data trends in critical business areas like profit & loss statements and sales across divisions or business units. Through this visualized data, experts can identify problem areas at a higher level or even drill down to deeper aggregate levels for more clarity. With this data-driven clarity, companies can devise more effective intervention measures.

Work with more updated financial data.

As a financial analyst, you can choose to set automatic updates for your dashboard data. This could be on a monthly, weekly, daily, or even real-time basis. With access to the latest and updated information, you have the right data to work with and make informed decisions for the financial benefit of your business.

Conclusion

Empowered by the latest data visualization techniques, Power BI dashboards are among the most effective resources for use by financial and accounting experts. As outlined in this write-up, a financial operations dashboard in Power BI can be developed with key finance-related metrics and KPIs.

Are you looking to leverage your business investment in Power BI dashboard solutions? Register in the Power BI Workshop by SocialSpace Academy today and take advantage of this powerful tool in your Organization.