This is the third article where I have covered building a P&L in Power BI. My first 2 articles here and here focused on how to use the DAX language to solve some of the common problems with P&L reporting, such as adding sub totals into the visual, % of totals, etc. You can read those articles if you are interested. In the article today I will show you how to use the new Info River Financial custom visual to achieve essentially the same outcome without any DAX at all (and I mean none!).
Info River Financial Custom Visual
This custom visual is currently in development by Visual BI. You can visit the Info River Website here and download a beta copy of the custom visual I have used in the video today.
Here is my final P&L Statement
Here is the final copy of the P&L statement I built using Info River Finance – zero DAX.
Demo
The best way for me to show you how to do this is simple to show you in a video, so here is the video.
Pricing and GA
At this stage I do not have any information about the pricing of the InfoRiver Financial custom visual or any of the other 2 visuals that will be coming in the future. The Financial custom visual is currently in Beta, so it is free for you to try. If you think this visual could help you with your Power BI reporting, then why not give it a go.
Here and there new visuals come out for making the P&L’s, balance sheets etc. I’m just thinking that costs can get pretty expensive when each user needs a license. PBI license €8,70/month, but some custom visuals charge €5,00/month. When you compare it to the regular license, it’s sounds like an expensive deal.
What’s your take on this Matt?
This is such an important point, and I agree with you. I think ultimately you (the customer) need to clarify the value you are receiving and the software vendor needs to work out how to charge you a fair price. The more value it adds, the more it is worth paying for the software. But it is complicated, because Power BI is basically a per user licence/fee and not every user gets the same value. The person that builds the report using this custom visual will get enormous value in time savings, but the end user may not see any value at all – they just see the same report they would have seen if the report builder took 100 hours more effort.
I don’t have an answer on this one, but it is definitely the right question to ask.
That sure would have been handy a few years ago LOL, although my full DAX version still getting it done. Nicely done!
Another option for no DAX financial reporting that also includes visualization according to IBCS, commenting and write-back/planning: https://www.acterys.com/financial-reporting-in-power-bi/
Hi Matt
Thanks for sharing this. Readers would also be interested in the Zebra BI custom visuals which can do all this and much more. Sure you will have to pay for them – and you should! For IBCS compliant enterprise financial reporting with automatic variance analysis look no further. Income statement, Balance sheet, Cashflow – anything that involves intermediate calculations. It has cut my development time for complex client projects by about 80%.
Thanks again for all your great work.
Tony maclaren
Totally agree. The Zebra BI visuals are great.
Hello Tony, Inforiver as a product is 100% IBCS compliant and Certified. When you take a look at the Business Edition (https://inforiver.com/editions/) that will get revealed at our June 03 Webinar (https://inforiver.com/webinars/) – you will realize that Inforiver is the fastest way to create any IBCS standard reports (in fact less than 1 minute for any table templates) with nothing to click or setup (fully automatic).
Very clever visual! Thanks Matt. I wonder whether they are also planning to do a similar visual for Balance Sheet & Cash Flow to make it easy to produce a full 3-way financial model in PBI
As I mentioned in the video, I am helping the company with some testing including the other 2 products that are being developed. These will be launched in beta in June. I can’t say too much, but they are pretty amazing products.
Keep us posted, ive build w3 way models in Excel but PowerBI would be the Ultimate for me, very exciting.