Excel: the finance team’s best friend. That is until due to rapid growth, increased business complexity, or the pursuit of tighter security and compliance, it no longer makes the cut.
Then add to these challenges the surge in the amount of data we collect, and the sources of data from multiple business systems that needs to be aggregated into spreadsheets, and the result is a reporting process that is manual, inefficient, and error prone.
What are finance teams turning to?
As is evident with the increasing number of active users, many find Power BI as a natural next step. Automating the consolidation of data from multiple systems and presenting the business intelligence facts in easy to understand dashboard visualisations that lead to actionable insights, Power BI plays a key role in an efficient and improved reporting process. Where Power BI falls short is in its ability to complete integrated planning and forecasting, such as what-if analysis and driver-based planning.
For this we need to be able to “write back”, and this is where Power BI is unable to help us.
The Planning, Budgeting, and Forecasting gap.
Having worked with numerous organisations in this space, our business planning consultants can clearly identify a disconnect between the analytics tool and the financial planning tool. The result is that a lot of time is still spent in reporting drudgery as opposed to interacting with the business and providing decision support.
Power BI Planning and Forecasting with Kepion.
Kepion and Power BI bring together the powerful BI tools from the Microsoft Business Intelligence platform and the planning, forecasting, and budgeting capabilities of Kepion to deliver a full Corporate Performance Management (CPM) software solution and an end-to-end BI reporting and analysis suite.
The real beauty of the solution is that users get the full functionality of a business budgeting and planning solution with the all-important functionality of what-if analysis, driver-based planning, management of assumptions, formulas, and drill-down all the way to granular details. The planning results are then seamlessly integrated into the data warehouse using Kepion’s writeback functionality. This enables users to easily surface the forecast data in Power BI.
Watch this short demo of how an organisation can use Power BI and Kepion to plan for adding a new branch in Adelaide and Brisbane and budget for headcount and salary cost for full time employees.
Join our latest webinar to learn how to integrate Planning, Budgeting, and Forecasting capabilities into Power BI Dashboards and Kepion.
