How to convert my management accounts into an Online PowerBI Dashboard

July 25, 2022

When you spend a lot of time sending excel spreadsheets and PDF management accounts around your business or to your clients, it is very common to ask why this could not be produced as some sort of online financial dashboard with a custom URL to view your reports. Of course, you then explore Futrli, Fathom and Spotlight to provide this but realise they are extremely expensive and will simply never provide the level of flexibility that you need for more bespoke reporting requirements.

You then start to explore Microsoft's PowerBI which seems to tick all your boxes, but you simply get overwhelmed by the size of the task and the complexities of learning DAX and how you will link the reports to your cloud accounting software.

Accounting.Bi attempts to solve this by providing you will a customizable API gateway to link your accounting software to PowerBI, while providing PowerBI templates and support to guide you through your journey to achieve your truly scalable financial dashboard solution.

How to build your management accounts in PowerBi using AccountingBi

To start building your management accounts in PowerBI, you follow the steps below:

Review the Structure of your existing management accounting reports.
Go to Chart of Accounts and Report Mapping in your Accounting.bi account to update your P&L and Balance Sheet Headers.
Download your Accounting.bi PowerBI template (you may need to speak to us to ensure it is an unrestricted template).
Review the DAX, and PowerBI matrix to align it to your existing management accounting reports.
Launch the PowerBI Service and Sync your reports to Xero, Sage, Zoho Books, or QuickBooks.

We appreciate learning DAX and PowerBI matrix' can be a gradual process so we are on hand for bespoke report builds and supporting you and your clients.

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Why is PowerBI important for Accountants?

As an accountant, you may find yourself referring to multiple sources to track the performance of your client’s cash flow, profitability, business trends and even bookkeeping cycle. What if you could access those results and comparisons automatically refreshed, on-demand, from your tablet, smartphone, PC, or even wearable device? Business intelligence and data visualisation systems can provide accountants with – the critical data and organisation summary in a custom format in one (or more) visuals or a dashboard. One of these powerful business intelligence tools is PowerBI.

Power BI: What is DAX?

DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) is a formula expression language developed by Microsoft to interact with data in different analysis services and visualisation tools platforms like Power BI, PowerPivot and SSAS tabular models. DAX can seem familiar to competent excel users as the language uses similar formulas and expressions.