PowerBI

Comfort Functions for Easy Profit & Loss statements in Power BI and Excel – Part2

by

Here comes some long awaited comfort functions for part 2 of my easy P&L series. In the first section I’ve presented the general principle on how to work with a structure using an accounts-group-table. Today I will present 2 alternatives to define the reports without specifying single accounts. So if a new accounts are added to the chart of accounts, you don’t have to adjust your report definitions: Just make sure that to fill in all the fields in your account-group-table and you’re ready to go 🙂

No need to specify single accounts

So you only need to adjust your report definitions if you add new group items. If that’s still too much, take the 2nd solution, which will even eliminate that requirement:

  1. Individual Account Layout: Just define each subtotal and determine for which subtotals single accounts shall be shown
No more specification of individual accounts

How to use it:

How to use Individual Report Layout

2. Ultrashort Account Layout: Further simplification of just defining the groups (hierarchy) that shall be shown (with option to filter on one of them)

No need to define individual group items

How to use it:

How to use Ultrashort Layout

So these 2 different layouts will both produce the same reports incl. all accounts – just like in the first example. So you can choose which layout-style suits you best – actually, you can use all 3 in parallel. You just have to make sure to grab your pivot-rows from the correct tables and in Excel to grab the matching measures, as they all have their own bridge-tables (which need to be used in the measures):

 

How it works

Read more

Dynamic & bulk type transformation in Power Query, Power BI and M

by

This is just a quick code-share-of-the-day of different scenarios for dynamic type transformation of multiple columns at once. The syntax to transform the format of 2 columns (“Column1” and “Column2”) in a table (“Source”) looks like this: Now if you would like to do one of the following: 1. Force all columns of the table to … Read more

How to tame Case Sensitivity in Power Query and PowerBI

by

Have you heard of “Comparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase”?

If the answer is “No” (or something similar), you will be very delighted to hear that this is your key to disable case sensitivity in comparing operations.

So if you want to check if a substring like “car” is contained somewhere, you can write:

Text.Contains(MyText, "car", Comparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase)

and the expression will return true for all cases of car like: CAR, Car, caR… .

The official documentation looks like this:

Read more

Easy Profit and Loss and other (account) scheme reports in Power BI and Power Pivot using DAX

by

This is about an easy way to create typical finance reports like Profit and Loss using DAX that (unlike all other solutions I’ve come across so far) can be handled with very basic knowledge of this language like this:

Image1

The trick

The trick that makes my solution so easy lies in the fact that it requires no aggregation functions of the output-mediums like:

  • pivot-tables: who struggle with asymetric logic and are not available in Power BI so far
  • cubefunctions: who are not available in PowerBI so far

So we have to build the details as well as all aggregations into the solution as it is and don’t rely on/use any aggregation functions (This means for Excel: We have to turn off subtotals as well as totals in our pivot tables. It means for Power BI: Hurray! Finally a solution where the lack of pivot-tables doesn’t matter).

How to

The aim is to create a table/matrix with (account) details and aggregations into the rows and different slices of time-Intervalls or comparisons into the column sections. As for the columns, this will be covered by measures like [Actuals], [Budget], [PreviousPeriods], [Differences in all shapes…]. And – as the values in the columns should be the same – I’d prefer to use only one measure per column – that is fully sliceable and works on all (sub-) totals of course. … Ok – so some dreams later I found it:

MyMagicMeasure := CALCULATE([StandardMeasure], AccountsAllocation)

So you just wrap simple measures like Act=SUM(Fact[Amount]), Plan=SUM(Plan[Amount]), DiffPlan_Act=[Plan]-[Act] … into the CALCULATE together with the bridge-table as the filter-argument:

This is the many2many-technique in it’s simplest form (PostFromMarcoRusso). It all goes via simple aggregation on all accounts found in the filter context:

Image4

Our  bridge-table “AccountsAllocation” consists of one account number per simple account and has multiple rows for the (sub-)totals – being all accounts that belong to them:

Image5

The ConsKey stands for the row in our report (1) and the AccountKey_ holds the account numbers that are going to be aggregated (many (for the sub-totals) and 1 for the account-rows). So all we need is this unique and simple aggregation on AccountKey for every row in the report – with a filter from the Reports-table via our bridge table to the DimAccounts, who then filters our FactTables: 1 -> many -> 1 -> many.

Read more

Advanced type detection in Power BI and Power Query: Table.ClassifyMixedColumnTypes

by

This is not a proper blogpost, just a quick share of a function I’ve created today which I think will be very useful for others as well: Automatic type detection will assign only one type to a column, but sometimes there are multiple types in it and then the type “any” will be applied, which means no … Read more