5 Unknown Facts about Power BI

That Create Project RiskEnsure your Power BI investment has the biggest and fastest return by understanding these

common misconceptions about Power BI and how to overcome them.

5 Unknown Facts about Power BI That Create Risk

Power BI has been heavily advertised by Microsoft lately, and for a good reason. This data visualization solution has taken a key component of business intelligence and delivered a clean, visually captivating tool for communicating business data in a useful and valuable way. The technology behind Power BI is sophisticated and can deliver on its promise, but what many IT and business decision makers come to learn (sometimes well into a Power BI project) is that it’s not always the easy to use, dynamic tool they’d hoped it was.

Jet Reports is in the business of business intelligence. We have helped thousands of clients to realize the true potential of fast, easy, anywhere reporting. We’ve dedicated our entire business to developing the right business intelligence tools for people just like you. And as part of our obsession with data, we want to share FIVE things you probably didn’t know about Power BI, and explain how they can introduce risk into your business intelligence project, offering pointers to overcome the challenges.

5 Things to Consider about a Power BI Investment

1 – Power BI is Not a Standalone Solution

Yes, Power BI is a fantastic data visualization tool, but many people fail to realize that it doesn’t easily house, transfer, or normalize data from multiple data sources. Before you can use the features to build insights in Power BI, you must first develop what can quickly become complicated data models, or create your own data warehouse. This can take months depending on the volume of your business data and complexity of your systems (as well as the bandwidth of your IT department). It can also be a very costly project that degrades in value over time; custom built data models create problems when you try to integrate new solutions or upgrade old ones.

The key to being successful with Power BI is the quality and relevancy of your data across your users. You can either build custom data solutions to feed Power BI or use a tool like Jet Enterprise which provides pre-built cubes, connectors, and data warehouse automation. Whichever you choose, remember this is a critical component, so plan your implementation time accordingly. A custom-built data warehouse and set of models can take upward of 2 years to build, and requires the skills of specialized programmers and IT staff, whereas Jet Reports can have you up and running in a matter of weeks with little to no programming required.

Jet Reports | 5 Unknown Facts about Power BI That Create Project Risk

2 – The Included Content Packs Are Insufficient

Microsoft provides a set of standard content packs designed to help you get started with Power BI. While these content packs offer valuable tools to help you launch a Power BI solution, they are not sufficient for the long-term use and development of the platform.

Your data is yours alone, and no two businesses act the same. The content packs can’t provide the specific collection of reports, workbooks, and data sets you need in the way your business stakeholders need them. You will find yourself in the position of once again waiting on IT to help you, or trying to find a work around. This negatively impacts the quality of your data and the value of your Power BI solution, and significantly reduces the ROI.

Being able to create the things you need on the fly is a strategic and necessary part of effectively leveraging business intelligence. By eliminating the need for programmers and data modelers, and empowering users with an understanding of Excel to create the dynamic content required, you vastly increase the value of the tool. The key to enabling that? A normalized data set and data warehouse designed to pull data from multiple sources, and serve it to the end user in a consumable, easy to use format.

Power BI

Jet Reports | 5 Unknown Facts about Power BI That Create Project Risk

3 – Power BI Cannot Create Financial Statements

Yes, we’re serious. One of the more prevalent misunderstandings and the source of frustration for many CFOs and CEOs across the globe is the fact that Power BI cannot be used to build your board-ready financial statements.

A dashboard is one thing, and something Power BI does a great job at delivering, but paginated reports are a completely different beast. Attractive visualizations help to quickly identify trends and spot anomalies, painting the bigger picture of your business operations – but this doesn’t replace your need for financials or operational details. Financial statements, receivable reports, and anything showing more than the basics will require a completely different set of skills.

Power BI lets you see the big picture, but the smaller details and itemized data are crucial when trying to make decisions that impact your cash flow and revenues. Additionally, regulatory requirements, banks and lenders, and other sources need you to produce actual financial statements on a timely basis, and there is no simple way to export that data from Power BI. And unless you have PowerPivot experts on staff, even creating some of the dashboards can be tricky.

Having access to fast, simple, and easy to customize reports directly inside Excel can ensure financial statements are accurate and available when required.

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Jet Reports | 5 Unknown Facts about Power BI That Create Project Risk

4 – Power BI Does Not Enable Simple Integration of Multiple Data Sources

While adding a data source to Power BI may be a relatively simple and straightforward exercise, combining data from multiple data sources together is something much more complicated.

Power BI cannot easily handle data normalization for tasks like Master Data Management. When you have things like item numbers, customer numbers, GL accounts, etc. that don’t align perfectly across systems, it creates a huge challenge for those who are not intimately familiar with data modeling. Most businesses don’t employ data scientists and modelers who know how to integrate multiple data sources to effectively manage the data and ensure inputs are valuable and true. As this is a highly sophisticated discipline, it is something even programmers would struggle to manage with any degree of certainty. And this is a huge problem with Power BI – it requires the work of external experts to become the powerful tool that it can be. And that work comes at a price, both relative to time and cash. If you’re storing data in more than one place (and who isn’t?) then having the use of pre-built connectors and a proper data warehouse is going to be the best path forward for reporting and business analytics. And your data warehouse can feed Power BI; it’s just a matter of whether you have the time and resources to build your own data warehouse, or if you’re more the type to seek out something pre-built, like Jet Reports.

Jet Reports | 5 Unknown Facts about Power BI That Create Project Risk

5 – Creating Custom Calculations Is Not That Simple, or Fast

Imagine you want to do something as common as a month-to-date or year-to-date calculation; simple, right? Guess again. To perform this type of calculation (and numerous other common ones), you need a date calculator – something that isn’t built into Power BI and isn’t standard. Alternatively, you can use a custom table or DAX, which you would need to build on your own with, you guessed it, programmers. The new Quick Measures functionality is a step in the right direction but the number of options is still too limited to solve many day-to-day problems.

This is another example of how Power BI is not always a quick and easy solution to implement but, instead, is a highly sophisticated tool that is only as good as the way it’s set up. A seemingly simple request can take a disproportionate amount of time and effort to build; expecting Power BI to deliver outside of its confines will only create poor results and wasted resources.

Jet Reports | 5 Unknown Facts about Power BI That Create Project Risk

About the Author

Brian Petersen, VP of Customer EngagementBrian Petersen has over ten years’ experience working with hundreds of clients to ensure that they get the most from their reporting and Microsoft Dynamics investments. Formerly the Director of Business Intelligence, he has built a deep understanding of how BI can impact an organization and uses his experience and background to help guide customers toward profitable business decisions. With an interest in helping bring Power BI to its full potential, Brian has dedicated significant time to understanding the relationship between data quality and valuable visualizations, and how that translates into business impact.

As VP of Customer Engagement, he also oversees the global teams that train and consult over 154,000 Jet Reports users worldwide.

Twitter @BrianAtJet

Get More from Power BIJet Reports loves Power BI. We’re huge fans of everything business intelligence, and Power BI truly delivers stunning, interactive visualizations and dashboards that we love to use. Power BI has the capability of changing the way you see your business, but only when properly set-up and used in context to deliver what it was designed to deliver - visuals. There is a gap between interactive dashboards and financial reporting, however; a huge one. Businesses still require the operational and financial reporting capabilities that help guide decision making and improve throughput, revenue, and overall business standing. With Jet Reports, you fill that gap and take the time, stress, and expense out of getting your data into Power BI so that you can start using the solution to its full potential – almost instantly. With Jet Reports, you fill that gap and take the time, stress, and expense out of getting your data into Power BI so that you can start using the solution to its full potential – almost instantly.

We encourage anyone considering a Power BI investment to put some time into understanding what it is, and what it isn’t, which will help you make better decisions from the start, and set-up your entire business intelligence and reporting environment for success. We are never too busy to help people explore all the options they have for getting fast, accurate, anywhere business data in the format they need!

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80% FasterPower BI is only as good as the data it can access. Building a data warehouse takes time and requires a significant financial investment. Learn how Jet Reports can reduce the timeline from months to days, and have you seeing a return on your Power BI investment, almost instantly.

Jet Enterprise is the fast, flexible corporate analytics and reporting solution uniquely designed to deliver a ready-to-use, secure, organized data warehouse platform for Microsoft Dynamics.

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To learn more about Enriching Power BI with Jet Reports visit us online today at: www.jetreports.com

Jet Reports delivers unparalleled access to data through fast and flexible reporting and business analytics solutions that are cost effective, provide rapid time-to-value and are built specifically for the needs of Microsoft ERP users. Embedded within the familiar Excel environment, Jet Reports leverages the existing skillsets of users and offers out-of-the-box reports and dashboards so companies can immediately eliminate all expensive, time consuming and error-prone manual tasks to get the accurate business information they need, when and where they need it.

Over 11,300 companies rely on Jet Reports every day for their financial reporting.