Using Power BI for Financial Insights with Solver
Solver Makes These Pre-Built Power BI Dashboards Come to Life
Power BI, a Microsoft analytics solution, uses structured and unstructured data to create beautiful dashboards that are packed with understandable data visualizations.
As Microsoft puts it, Power BI “bridges the gap between data and decisions.” With Solver’s integration to Power BI, your company can harness the “power” behind Power BI dashboards – and you can do so in just One Day!
How Do Companies Use Power BI?
It’s incredible to watch what you can do with Power BI. As financial modeling software, the top functions for Power BI include:
Financial models
Custom data visualizations
Organization of datasets to identify patterns
By integrating Power BI with Solver, you’ll have the visualizations you need to understand the “story” of your organization, so you can Accelerate Better Decisions. Best of all, since Solver provides true data integration, you’ll have the power to see trends in the making and finally become proactive about tackling emerging issues.
How Can You Get Started with Power BI?
If you haven’t had time to explore Power BI much, it can seem a bit intimidating at first glance. After all, there’s so much you can do with Power BI.
Of course, as a Microsoft app, Power BI will look familiar as soon as you start clicking around. It looks a little like PowerPoint. When you start setting up your first visualizations in Power BI, you’ll realize that the application truly provides endless options for configuring database settings to get the output you want.
Sound overwhelming? You’re not alone.
It’s right around this realization that many business leaders put Power BI on their “I’ll look into that more later” shelf. As a result, all that power sits there for months or years – wasted.
It is a shame to pay for great financial modeling software and visualization tools you never use. Fortunately, you don’t have to wait to harness the power of Power BI.
It’s easy to get started because Solver provides 50+ fully usable Power BI dashboards out of the box that are available for you and your team to start using on Day 1 of your Solver deployment. Since all these dashboards feature data integration with Solver, they will instantly light up with your relevant data – like magic!
The Top 5 Power BI Dashboards for Solver
In the Solver Marketplace, all of Solver’s Power BI dashboards are free for you to download, use, and customize – but which ones should you start with? Try these 5 top downloaded dashboards to see what works best for you.
Note: You can try interactive models of Solver’s 50+ Power BI dashboards to see how they work. Each dashboard is on its own page in the simulation, and you can quickly access them by clicking the relevant, colored button with a lowercase “i” in the chart on page 1. When you’re trying each dashboard, simply click the arrow in the top-left of each chart to return to the navigation chart on page 1.
To get the most from your exploration, follow the “Try It Yourself” recommendations listed below.
1. GL Budget Dashboard – Expenses
The GL Budget Dashboard – Expenses is interactive and parameter-driven, and it contains sections with expense trend and comparative charts, as well as variance reports.
Try It Yourself: Select different months and watch as the entire dashboard automatically creates and displays an estimate (Actual YTD + Forecast) for the current year and compares it to next year’s budget.
2. GL Combo Dashboard – Revenues
The GL Combo Dashboard – Revenues is interactive and parameter-driven, and it contains sections with KPIs, charts, and figures.
Try It Yourself: Click on any row in the two tables to see the selected GL revenue category or account highlighted as a portion of each chart.
3. GL Dashboard – 24-Month KPI Trend
The GL Dashboard – 24-Month KPI Trend is interactive and parameter-driven, and it contains sections with revenue, profit, and balance sheet ratio trend charts that include 2 years of history plus current-year budgets.
Try It Yourself: Focus in on any business metric by changing the filters on the left side of the screen and expanding the charts to a full-screen view.
4. GL Forecasting Dashboard – Profit Margins
The GL Forecasting Dashboard – Profit Margins is interactive and parameter-driven, and it contains sections with simulation sliders as well as profitability KPIs with related variance tables and graphical charts. Seeing instant answers to your ‘What If’ scenarios is one of the biggest benefits financial modeling software and dashboards can bring to your organization.
Try It Yourself: Move any of the sliders left or right to increase or decrease the weighting of that item for your simulated profitability estimate.
5. GL Variance Dashboard – Balance Sheet
The GL Variance Dashboard – Balance Sheet is interactive and parameter-driven, and it contains sections with matrix reports that can be sorted by variance percent, as well as comparative charts.
Try It Yourself: Click on any account row in the tables and see that GL account highlighted as a portion of each chart.
Ready to Get Started with Power BI?
Only Solver provides you with 50+ Power BI dashboards along with access to advanced and fully customizable planning and reporting templates from the Solver Marketplace on Day 1 of using Solver.
That’s $100K of value available on Day 1 of your Solver deployment, simply because we really do believe that you deserve to Accelerate Better Decisions, starting immediately.
If you had to waste months of your time setting up reports and planning forms, or learning how to create Power BI dashboards with data integration to your Solver data – well, that wouldn’t give you accelerated decisions would it?
It’s time to move faster. With Solver.
