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Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Microsoft Dynamics AX (Archived) / Using Power BI for fin...
Microsoft Dynamics AX (Archived)

Using Power BI for financial reporting?

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Posted on by Community Member

Hi all,

I searched through the forum for some examples of Dynamics AX 2012 reporting with the use of Power BI, and have still a couple of questions. If someone has experiense with AX2012/Power BI and could answer, it would be great.

  1. What kind of data connection do you use? Cubes, Direct Query, or import of AX data into Excel and then into Power BI?
  2. Do you have experience with financial reporting in Power BI? How do you use it in your company?

I am aware that Power BI is quite a powerful and versatile tool, but so far I have seen mostly examples of Power BI reports,that use Retail data/general statistics and made for general management. So actually it seems to be just more beautiful visualization of statistics, that could be also done in Excel.

What are crucial advantages of Power BI to Excel (as far as financial reporting is concerned)?

  1. As I understand, we can not use financial content packs with AX 2912?

Thanks a lot in advance!

 

Regards,

Jolyon

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I have the same question (0)
  • Youngstees Profile Picture
    Youngstees on at

    Hello!

    I guess it boils down to what kind of financial reporting you are going to do. If you want dashboard with KPI's, bar charts etc. Power BI is the tool to use. But if you are going to do Balance Sheets, Balance List or Income Statement I would consider to use Management Reporter which handels list reporting pretty well.

    So the answer to your questions:

    1. I would connect to the GL Cube or Sales Cube to get the financial data. You also have access to the Financial Dimensions from there.

    2. No

    3. No, you cannot use the Microsoft created Content Packs for AX 2012.

  • Suggested answer
    Vilmos Kintera Profile Picture
    Vilmos Kintera 46,149 on at

    The future of PowerBI lies in using the Entity Store, both for AX 2012 and AX 7. blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/.../introducing-entity-store-for-dynamics-ax-2012-r3

    blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/.../power-bi-integration-with-entity-store-in-dynamics-ax-7-may-update

    You essentially have a Data Warehouse, where you push your data based on SQL Server Change Tracking, and you can use the new and great features of Clustered/Non-clustered columnstore indexes to speed up data requests.

    Then you can process the information stored in the Entity store (dwh) using PowerBI and visualize it however you want.

    The advantage over Excel is quite obvious: you have a relational database engine sitting under your report, which outperforms the limited Excel functionality with Pivots.

    In relation to financial reporting - where complex calculations are required, you are better to do that using AX SSRS where you may easily introduce business logic, compared to the limited functionality of Excel and PowerBI in this area.

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