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:

  1. We want to see our totals below the details and we need to see what they are and where they belong to.
  2. If we decide to show subtotals on the bottom, we’d prefer to see everything on the bottom, including the attribute.
  3. And an option to spare us the mention on top (green) would be very much appreciated as well: Just place everything on the bottom like so:

If you want to see this feature, please vote for it here:

https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas/suggestions/36031306-when-showing-subtotals-at-the-bottom-show-the-att

And another feature that’s missing in my eyes is conditional formatting to be applied on subtotals as well. This would allow us to use a larger variety of symbols for traffic light indicators, as we could use the native conditional formatting to apply colours: https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas/suggestions/17401381-conditional-formatting-for-total-and-subtotals-in

So pleeeeeease leave your votes on these features, as they will determine the priority for the team to work on!

Thanks & stay queryioius 😉

Comments (56) Write a comment

  1. And, importantly, not to mention the missing formatting (numbers, no currency symbol but with brackets for negative numbers). Currently can’t be done.

    Reply

  4. Pingback: Power BI Request: Subtotal Details At The Bottom Of A Section – Curated SQL

  5. Muito importante, hoje tenho grande dificuldade e retrabalho.

    Reply

    • Hello Martin,
      are we seeing your app here or did you discover a trick how to add brackets in Power BI natively?
      Still: Subtotals show at the top (like it’s currently possible in Power BI as well) and not at the bottom/after the details.
      ?
      Cheers, Imke

      Reply

      • @ Imke,

        he’s just using

        Format: Englisch (USA)

        giving you brackets and $ for your measure.

        Reply

  8. This is all standard Power BI – Acterys would just add write back, 3 way forecasting logic and modelling to it. You can switch the subtotals to be showing at bottom it works as well – the only issue is that it’s called “total” and the unnecessary “total” at the end- my solution avoids the other problems that you are showing. I agree that this is a worthwhile feature request. The formatting is just a standard DAX formatting string: in my case as I am also covering currency conversion with live FX rates it’s: depending if value is negative: format(sumx(‘Xero_Finance’,Xero_Finance[Value]/MIN(‘Currency'[Units])),”$#,##0.00;($#,##0.00)”). Here is the related report: https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiMzMzZWExYTQtOWJmZS00Yzc4LWEzZTQtZWRjYjAxM2QxYTVmIiwidCI6ImJkZGExNGRmLWQxMmYtNDBlNS1iYmZkLTZmYTI3NzRmMzkzOCIsImMiOjN9

    Reply

  11. Hey there, Did you create dis P&L out of a data warehouse or build the query within power query and created the measures? I’m trying to do it from a query against AX at the moment. thanks!

    Reply

  12. There is an alternate & intuitive approach using ValQ visual that does not require DAX. You can also add additional rows (e.g. # of shares outstanding and EPS to an income statement) if they are not available in the source data, apply different conditional formatting for different elements (e.g. Expenses and Gross Margin), and many more.

    Check out the video and the .pbix file here – https://valq.com/demos/financial-income-statement-microsoft-power-bi-planning-forecasting-budgeting/

    The bonus: You can also run forecast & simulate on P&L, create & compare multiple scenarios, create new budgets, save to Azure, run detailed variance analysis and many more.

    Reply

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