Learn how Vena reduces budgeting, reporting, and analysis times by 50%.
Data is at the center of how companies make decisions today. But even as the keepers of much of their organizations’ data, finance teams are often detached from the strategic side of the business.
According to our most recent State of Strategic Finance Report, just 40% of finance teams say that they have a seat at the strategic planning table, and only an alarming 13% are consulted about the financial aspects of strategic decisions.
The problem, in many cases, is a lack of understanding from non-finance decision makers around what the data provided by finance means—or a lack of visibility into that data altogether.
Finance dashboards built in a tool like Power BI offer a potential solution to this disconnect, as they can translate data into compelling, approachable formats with visuals that make insights easy for anyone to understand.
In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know to get started with Power BI dashboards, including:
Essentially, Power BI can source and streamline data from disparate systems to provide cohesive data insights in one view. This allows your finance team to move away from siloed spreadsheets and databases towards a centralized and shared single source of truth.
With its robust data modeling capabilities, Power BI also enables advanced financial modeling and analysis, including scenario planning, predictive modeling, trend identification, and variance analysis, all executed through the versatile DAX language.
Dashboards are one of Power BI's most powerful features, translating complex financial data into clear and compelling visual representations. Translating live data into charts, graphs, and tables that can be more easily understood helps key decision makers in other parts of your organization leverage financial data more strategically, driving greater financial alignment across the board.
Crucially, Power BI dashboards allow stakeholders across the business to access the information themselves, meaning finance teams will spend less time pulling data and answering questions and more time on actual forecasting, planning and analysis.
Key features and benefits that finance teams gain from Power BI include:
Collectively, these features allow users with all levels of data experience to engage with finance-sourced data more actively in their everyday work while also enhancing reporting processes for finance teams.
Here are some of the best use cases for Power BI dashboards within the finance department (in our humble opinion):
An executive summary dashboard can serve as the primary mission control for your finance team—and the executive leadership you report to. This type of dashboard tracks high-level KPIs and metrics needed to understand the overall financial health of your organization at a glance.
Some metrics you could add to your executive summary Power BI dashboard include:
The kinds of visuals you might employ in a report like this to break down large amounts of information into a format that’s easy to understand at a glance include:
To get you started, you can download Vena’s Executive Dashboard template for Power BI.
One dashboard that can be especially helpful for your budgeting and forecasting is a predictive analytics dashboard, visualizing any potential variances in your forecasted plan versus your actuals.
In Power BI, you can consolidate your budget projections, actual performance data and future forecasts easily AND carry out complex modeling with help from Microsoft’s advanced AI capabilities.
Some metrics you might choose to focus on in your Power BI dashboard include:
Visuals you might employ include interactive line charts showcasing budget vs. actual figures, trend graphs illustrating historical data patterns, and waterfall charts indicating cumulative effects on forecasts.
A cash flow analysis dashboard can help you gain a holistic view of your organization's liquidity. It could track cash flow from operations, investments and financing activities to paint the most complete picture possible of your company’s current financial position.
Some metrics you could add to your cash flow analysis Power BI dashboard include:
Visuals you might employ include bar charts illustrating cash flow breakdowns, trend lines showcasing cash flow trends, and heatmaps displaying cash flow patterns.
An operational expenses (OpEx) dashboard can help you focus on controlling costs and optimizing operational efficiency. It could track various expense categories such as personnel, marketing, and overhead costs.
Some metrics you might include in your OpEx Power BI dashboard are:
Visuals you might employ are pie charts depicting expense composition, bar graphs illustrating expense trends, and variance analysis graphs.
A revenue dashboard can help you focus on monitoring your company’s income streams. It could track all important revenue sources, their growth trends over time and their forecasted growth.
Some metrics you might choose to focus on in your revenue Power BI dashboard include:
Visuals you might employ include line charts showcasing revenue trends, pie charts depicting revenue distribution, and customer cohort analysis.
To get you started, you can download Vena’s Revenue Planning and Projections Kit, which includes a dashboard template for Power BI that leverages AI.
A profitability dashboard can help you evaluate the overall financial health of your organization, allowing your to understand profitability drivers, optimize pricing strategies and enhancing overall financial performance.
Some metrics you might include in your profitability Power BI dashboard are:
Visuals you might employ include profit margin trend lines, ROI bar charts, stacked area charts illustrating income and expenses and waterfall charts.
A sales performance dashboard can provide insight into your company’s sales activities and effectiveness, helping you evaluate sales team performance, identify high-performing products and refine sales strategies.
Some metrics you might include in your sales performance Power BI dashboard are:
Visuals you might employ include bar charts illustrating sales trends, geographic heat maps showcasing regional sales distribution and funnel charts displaying conversion rates.
An HR planning dashboard can help you focus on effective workforce management and optimization, prioritizing strategic use of budget, talent acquisition and employee development.
Some metrics you might choose to focus on in your HR Planning Power BI dashboard are:
Visuals you might employ include attrition trend lines, recruitment funnel charts, and training impact visualizations.
To get you started, you can download Vena’s HR Executive Executive Dashboard template for Power BI.
You’ve decided on the critical dashboards you want to create in Power BI—now what?
Here’s a step-by-step process for creating a basic Power BI dashboard you can build on to track and analyze key financial metrics.
Determine the purpose and goals of your dashboard. Identify the key metrics and insights you want to present and who your audience would be. Then, start retrieving the relevant data from various sources. This can include databases, spreadsheets, online services or other data repositories.
Open Power BI Desktop and click on "Get Data" to connect to your data sources. Power BI supports a wide range of data connectors, including Excel, SQL databases, SharePoint, Salesforce and many more. Select the appropriate connector and follow the prompts to establish the connection.
Use the Power Query Editor to clean, transform and shape your dashboard data. You can do things like remove unnecessary columns, merge tables, split columns, apply filters or create calculated columns. This step ensures your data is in the desired format for analysis.
Design your financial data models by defining relationships between tables in the Power BI data view. This involves connecting related columns using drag-and-drop. Establishing these relationships correctly enables efficient data analysis and visualization.
Next, navigate to the report view and start creating visualizations. Power BI offers a wide range of data visualization types such as charts, tables, maps, cards, and more. Select the appropriate visualizations to represent your data effectively.
You can customize the visuals by modifying properties like colors, labels and axes.
Enhance your Power BI dashboard's interactivity with features like slicers, filters and drill-through. These enable each user to explore the data and uncover insights based on their specific requirements.
Make your dashboard visually appealing by applying formatting options such as fonts, colors, backgrounds and layouts. You can also apply pre-built themes or create custom themes to maintain a consistent look across your reports.
Once your dashboard is complete, publish it to Power BI. You can share your dashboard with others within your organization or make it publicly available. Share with intention and be sure to include key stakeholders who can use the dashboard to make decisions.
Continuously monitor the performance and usage of your Power BI dashboard. Gather feedback from your teams and make adjustments and improvements accordingly. Schedule data refreshes regularly to keep insights up to date.
With Vena Insights, all of your Vena data is available in real-time for intelligent reporting and analysis using embedded Power BI and Microsoft’s best-in-class AI and machine learning technology. This makes creating financial dashboards even easier, as you don’t need to export data to a separate application or switch between tools.
Check out our guide, "How To Create a Dashboard in Power BI in 10 Minutes" for a technical walkthrough (with video) on how to create a Power BI dashboard through Vena’s integration with Power BI.
Power BI dashboards have dual purposes—they elevate your finance team’s ability to generate insights for better planning and translate complex financial data into easily digestible formats leaders can use to make decisions.
Even better, Power BI can seamlessly connect to your existing systems and data sources so you know you’re always seeing complete and up-to-date insights.
Did you find this article helpful? If so, you might enjoy this related content:
What Is Power BI? Everything You Need To Know
The Ultimate Guide to Financial Dashboards
Advanced Power BI Features in Vena
Explore Our Library of Free Financial Excel Templates!
Learn More