Profit & Loss Template - Power BI

Did you know that you can add a Profit & Loss report into Power BI from a Xero, Quickbooks or MYOB data source? There has historically been a lot of talk about Power BI and the use with visuals, customer analysis, KPIs, etc. It’s overlooked how popular it is to run a Profit & Loss report.

So now that you know you can do it, why would you do it? Here are the most common use cases for putting together a Profit & Loss;

  1. Consolidation – Power BI handles consolidation extremely well -  Check out this link to see some of the current Consolidated Etani templates.

  2. Variance Analysis – monthly, weekly, quarterly, budget v actual. What did you predict and what really happened.

  3. Customisation of your PnL – This is very popular and it occurs horizontally on your chart of accounts and vertically on your columns. Vertically is your comparatives, actuals, last week, last year, YTD, % of revenue, % of Direct Costs to individual revenue items, etc. Horizontally is designing your chart of accounts. You don’t want 10 motor vehicle account codes showing (you pact them into 1 account), EBIT, distributions of profit, % gross profit with colour traffic light reporting. Designing horizontally and vertically is very powerful.

As you can see there are many reasons to present Profit & Loss reports through Power BI. But I left out the TWO BIGGEST REASONS OF ALL... Automation and Scale.

Automation – Once these reports are looking the way you want them to look, you certainly DO NOT want to replicate it over and over in Excel, data dumping, reconciling, adding additional accounts to the account mapping file. Power BI automates the entire process, so when you open it 1 week later, all the new data has been updated like magic!

Scale – When you spend a huge amount of time creating, it's great to know it's automated, but you also would like to know that it is scalable. You would like to give a very similar report to many of your other clients. Power BI lets you do this. 

We’ve put together this video on Profit & Loss reporting for you to visualise how it looks in Microsoft Power BI.

Cameron Lynch