DynamicsCon 2021 Preview: The case for financial reports in Power BI

Accounting goes back centuries, but is Power BI ready to play a part in some of the most fundamental requirements of financial reporting?

Joe Little of Western Computer will be evaluating the capabilities of Microsoft's analytics landscape from an accounting perspective at DynamicsCon 2021, which runs from March 16 to 18. His session, "Using Power BI to Create Financial Reports for Business Central", takes place on March 18 at 5pm EST (GMT -5).

Organizations have a lot of options when it comes to building their financial reports, but few companies have used Power BI for this purpose until now. The reasons vary, but a typical critique is difficulty meeting the specific needs of CFOs. Little says he took on this session at DynamicsCon to challenge his own understanding of what Power BI could do in conjunction with financial data from Dynamics 365 Business Central.

The reason I took this session was I wanted to find out if it was possible to do a good job with this type of report in Power BI.  We knew that Power BI with analytical type reporting, but there are a couple of extra requirements around financial reporting, and we weren’t sure how well Power BI could be applied to those.  As it turns out,  Power BI is pretty good.

And he acknowledged that many finance professionals have not yet been convinced of this approach based on what they have seen in Power BI in the past.