CFO overview and Financial Insights KPI list

Look at all these KPIs!

There’s all these wonderful out-of-the-box reports provided by Microsoft for Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations. When you spin up a new instance, the values just show up. Unfortunately, there’s not much of an explanation of how they’re calculated.

Obviously, Microsoft is trying their best to provide reports that show valuable numbers but is trying to keep them generic enough so they apply to many different companies. In trying to explain how to tailor these to individual needs, I’ve found it necessary to first examine how they’re coming up with the numbers.

How are these calculated?

Account categories. The standard account categories provided out out of the box (one of the few pieces of data provided with a brand new implementation of Dynamics AX or Dynamics 365) are referred to by the standard Financial Reporting reports and also the Power BI analytical workspaces. In fact, they’ve been used this way since AX 2009’s OLAP cubes attempted the same thing.

If you used the standard account categories and didn’t create your own, you should be in pretty good shape. I’ve put together a little cheat sheet looking through the code to help identify how they’re referenced. The first screenshot shows the definition of the groupings included in the KPI calculation. The second column of this sheet shows the account categories that make up the grouping.

Account categories used as a basis for KPI calculations

The next screenshot shows the actual calculations.  You’ll see that the groupings from the first screenshot are referenced in these equations.

Calculations used in CFO overview analytical workspace

Here’s how it looks in PowerBI

As you can see, there’s a bunch more KPIs and PowerBI calculations that are done with these measures that I provided. Things like COGS last year and Analysis Currency Amount This Year are just M measures that use the ones I’ve documented. Additionally, there’s other measure groups for budget information and other things, but these calculations I’ve provided should get you headed in the right direction towards understanding where these numbers come from.

PowerBI Desktop file for the CFO overview

Questions about Dynamics 365?

Head on over to https://www.dynamicconsulting.com/dynamics-365-for-finance-and-operations/ to learn more!

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