Accounting Archives – The BIccountant

Dynamic Benford’s Law measures in Power BI and Power Pivot

Benford’s Law compares the frequency distribution of leading digits to its (empirically proven) natural counterpart. This can then be used to detect fraud and errors.

Comparison between Benford distribution and actual

The green columns show how often each number should be the first digit in numbers that should follow the Benford-distribution. In black you’ll see the actual distribution of first digits within my table. Lastly, the red line shows the percentual absolute deviations between actual and Benford values.

In this example, there is a relatively high occurrence of numbers starting with 4 and 5. So this could be a sign for fraudulent manipulations.

The Benford Distribution

First you need a table with the Benford-distribution. Just load it as a disconnected table to your data model and name it “BenfordTable”. The “Value”-field from this table will be taken as x-axis for the visualisations. As the Benford-distribution is logarithmic, it can quickly be created with the following DAX-code:

Benford’s law Measure

The measure calculates how often a number starts with one of the BenfordNumbers (1..9) compared to the total number of rows in the FactTable.

If there are blank in the Value-column of the table to be analyzed, the measure has to be adjusted by filtering them out in the VAR CountTotal: ( CALCULATE(COUNTROWS(FactTable), FactTable[Value] <> BLANK()) )

Please note that you can create as many measures as you need in one model. So if you have multiple columns to investigate, just write a measure for each.

Benford’s law Variance Measure

To calculate the difference between target and actual, I use a MAXX-aggregation. This returns the maximum difference there is for a number. I also use this in a card visual if I want to add a data driven alert. So I don’t have to check and eyeball the chart regularly, but can just use this in a card visual in a dashboard. Then I’ll set a threshold value for the alert and will not miss any alarming developments.

Why DAX?

I’m using measures here instead of a calculated column (in the Benford-Table) because this allows me to filter and slice my table. This allows for making advanced and flexible analysis like comparing different values against each other or over time against the Benford distribution:

Benford’s Law Charts: Comparisons with various dimensions

Enjoy & stay queryious 😉

Get full Time Activity data from QuickBooks into Power BI

Problem

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).

Solution

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”:

Why Power BI isn’t suitable for Financial Statements (… currently … hopefully …)

!! 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:

Create list of accounts from NAV account schedules or COA totaling syntax

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

Stretching and Compressing Time Series with Power Query and Power BI

The good folks from SumProduct have published a challenge for Excel that I find worth doing in Power Query instead:

The Challenge

Stretching or compressing a forecast so that the proportion of the original series will be maintained:

The Function

This is not so easy mathematically (as the solution-blogpost explains in detail), so the code for the function isn’t short as well:

Right Aligning Text in Power BI: Format Improvements for Easy Profit&Loss Reports

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:

Right aligning text (please vote for it here: Right align text in Power BI – edit 15th Nov: We’re there: Right aligning text is available now: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-desktop-november-2017-feature-summary/)
Display numbers in different formats within one column (either to be implemented as a “neutral” format for Switch-measures, where the referenced measures carry the formatting attributes already, or as a part of a formula-based conditional formatting) (Thanks Matt for the voting-link: Conditional format SWITCH measure)

So for the moment I choose between the following workaround-options:

Display %-values in a separate column
Format numbers as text and fill up with spaces so that all end up right aligned
See the suggestion from Matt Allington in the comments below (very nice)

Right aligning text or percentage figure in new column

For both options the preparations are the same:

New Generation Finance – Accounting – Controlling using Microsoft BI stack

Posts Tagged ‘Accounting’