Power BI for Accountants: Automate Reports and Impress Your Clients

Are you considering using Power BI for your accounting practice? Wondering what processes Power BI can help you streamline?

As a Power BI consultancy firm, we have worked with dozens of accounting practitioners. In this article, we want to share how the top accountancies are using Power BI to improve their business processes.

If you want to know more about Power BI and what it is, feel free to refer to our ultimate Power BI guide.

Automate Financial Reporting

If your CPA practice provides financial advise beyond simple bookkeeping, you likely share financial reports with clients. The process of producing these financial reports takes a lot of time since it has multiple steps that are usually done manually, including:

• Data extraction from QuickBooks Online, Xero or other accounting systems
• Data transformation in Excel
• Dragging the formulas down in your Excel cells

These data tasks need to be performed manually for every client is very time-consuming if you have a large portfolio or accounts. The good news is that Power BI can automate every part of this manual process.

For example, here is how an accountancy practice we worked with automated these processes with Power BI:

• They used a QuickBooks Online connector to extract the data automatically from 50+ client accounts and combine it together in a single database. The connector refreshes the data automatically every 2 hours which fully automates the data extraction process.
• They used Power Query within Power BI to apply data transformation steps. As a result, every time that they refreshed their data, the steps were applied automatically.
• They used the free Power BI QuickBooks Online template to visualise their data, which saved them dozens of hours developing this report themselves.

Similar data connectors are also available for Xero and Zoho Books, enabling clients to automate data extraction from their accounting systems.

Create Client Reporting Portals

Some accountancies go a step further and create online portals where their clients can sign in and view their reports at any time. Here is how those portals are typically built:

1. A single Power BI report is built which combines the data from all of the clients.
2. A row-level security rule is created in Power BI. When the clients sign in, the portal identifies the user ID and applies the security rule which only shows the data rows that are relevant to the logged in customer.
3. A Power Pages portal is built as a front-end interface where users can sign in and view their reports
4. Finally a Power BI report is embedded into the Power Pages portal.

This approach has several benefits:

1. Accountancies can share Power BI reports to users with no license. This makes the process easier since they don’t have to procure Power BI licenses for every client individually.
2. The Power Apps portals can be fully while-labelled so the users would never know that they were developed with Power BI and Power Pages. As a result, they look like custom software that accountants developed for their practice. This ultimately helps to stand out from the competition and becomes a unique selling point.

Create Advanced Accounting Analysis

The functionality of Power BI is better suited for financial analysis as compared to traditional spreadsheets.  Once you get comfortable with the interface, you can create some amazing accounting dashboards.

Power BI has multiple features that make in a great choice for financial analysis including:

1. Time intelligence DAX functions – they enable the analysts to create year-to-date, same period last year and other calculations that are essential for analysing accounting data.
2. Big data analytics – spreadsheets struggle to process large data volumes. When you approach 1 million rows in Excel, your file size approaches 100+ MB which makes it hard to open and slow to work with. Not only Power BI can process this data volume but it also enables users to share reports through Power BI service. This means that your audience does not have to download heavy files to view the analysis, instead, they would view it via a web link.
3. Data visualisation – Power BI has superior data visualisation capabilities as compared to spreadsheets. This enables accountants to communicate the results of analysis to their clients clearly making their analysis more impactful.

P&L Analysis

Power BI enables accountants to bring the profit and loss statements to life with interactive data visualisation. By using these reports, the clients can clearly see the trends for their P&L metrics, understand the main drivers for change, and drill down into transactions.

As many accountants know, looking into percentages and trends gives a lot more context to the P&L statements. Presenting these KPIs in a visual form in Power BI makes the client reporting process a lot more effective.

Cash Flow Analysis

Cash is king for small businesses and many clients worry about their cash flow metrics on a regular basis. Creating cash flow analysis in Power BI helps the accountants to alleviate some of this anxiety by increasing the visibility of a company’s cash flow position. This makes clients feel like they are more in control of their cash flow since they know where they stand at any time.

Balance Sheet Analysis

Balance sheet analysis is most important for businesses in sectors like real estate because they typically have larger assets and liabilities. It is valuable for the clients in these sectors when their accountants provide these dashboards to them because they help to keep the liabilities under control.

Aged Account Receivables Analysis

Every B2B business is worried about the speed of revenue collection. An AR Power BI report highlights which clients still owe the money to the company, how much they owe and for how long.

When accountants provide this report to their clients, it helps them to collect revenue quicker and reduce bad debt by following up on outstanding invoices promptly.

Ready to Implement Power BI for Your Accountancy?

The importance of Power BI for accountants is beyond exaggeration. At Vidi Corp, we have helped dozens of accounting practices to implement Power BI in their business. As a result, we have many files and scripts that we can reuse, making our work very efficient.

If you want to chat more about how to implement Power BI in your CPA practice, please contact us now!