As per the time of writing, the native QuickBooks connector in Power BI has some shortcomings for the Time Activity-data: It will not return employee details (so you will not know who did the hours) and it will not return hours (if they haven’t been entered by start- and end-date).
But fortunately the connector has 2 functions, who can return the full data that the QBO-API has to offer. At the end of the list in the navigation pane there are the functions “Entity” and “Report”:
!! This is a clickbait post to get your vote for some missing features in Power BI !!
Although this might not be what the inventors of Power BI had in mind, large lots of folks are trying to create classical financial statements in it. And putting aside the afford that might go into getting the numbers right, there is still a major drawback to swallow:
In this blogpost I’ll show you how to create a list of account numbers from the totalling syntax that you find in Dynamics NAV account schedules or chart of accounts for example:
1000..1090|1500|2000..2020
This string shall be transformed into a “real” list of account numbers in the query editor that can be used to select all accounts within those ranges. Read more
The good folks from SumProduct have published a challenge for Excel that I find worth doing in Power Query instead:
Stretching or compressing a forecast so that the proportion of the original series will be maintained:
This is not so easy mathematically (as the solution-blogpost explains in detail), so the code for the function isn’t short as well:
Edit 14-Dec-2017: Now that we can right-align text measures in PowerBI, a SWITCH-measure like here: http://www.thebiccountant.com/2017/04/24/kpis-in-easy-profit-and-loss-for-powerbi/#comment-719 is the best alternative in my eyes. No need to read on 🙂
As shown in my last part of the Easy P&L-series, Power BI unfortunately still lacks some fundamental formatting options like:
So for the moment I choose between the following workaround-options:
For both options the preparations are the same:
A break-even analysis tells you at which value of the parameter in question your profit-calculation will turn positive (link). Here we need to sell at least 173 at a given price of 20 before we’ve recovered all our costs:
If your variable costs are constant, you can solve it by this formula:
BreakEvenQuantity = Total Fixed Costs / (Unit Sale Price - Unit Variable Costs)
You’ll find tons of examples on how to do this in Excel like here .
But in real life, the variable costs often depend on certain quantities as you get discounts for purchasing large amounts. The following table shows a cost structure with fix costs in row 1. The 3rd column “FixOrQty” indicates if the cost item is fix or dependent on the quantity (Qty). The 2nd row contains a variable cost that is constant with 2 for all quantities. Row 3&4 show a variable cost of 8 for quantities up to 100 and if you purchase more than 100 the costs will be lowered to 2 for all additional quantities. Row 5-7 have a similar structure, but with 3 quantity ranges:
