I am trying to make a weekly P&L report but haven't had any success yet. I wanted to know whether this was achievable (without having to change financial periods to weekly). The furthest I am is creating a GI (and report) with GLTran then filtering by the dates. But I then will have to categorize everything as per a financial statement which might not be the ideal solution.
Thanks
G
You can design this by using advanced report designer. You may have to create few additional columns in the chart of accounts to hold headings for different levels.
Related
I am working on a financial report now.there is an excel format available. i have to repeat the same in tableau. is it possible? or try o suggest some other BI tool.
I don't know about Tableau, based on what I know it should be possible. My company use Qlikview to present financial report.
http://www.qlik.com/
Is your data source in a fixed row/column structure? Tableau does not have any predefined formatting for financial statements in my experience, unless an ERP vendor has built something custom. You would have to create your own through 'groups' and calculated fields.
Problematic data source
There is a SharePoint list with columns: Person, Customer, Responsibility, Week_1, Week_2, Week_n. Values are workload estimates in percentage ( and estimated hours are then calculated from avg. working hours).
Reasoning
The reason for this is that the list is much easier to use as there is no need to create new line entry for every single week per employee.
My take on the issue
You might already see my problem. For painless analytics there should be a similar data model as described in Reasoning chapter.
However it should be possible to create required data model. A new column would be created and it should get its "Week"-value from a lookup-function that could return "ColumnName". This is possible in Excel, but for the record I haven't succeeded in PowerBI with DAX functions.
What would be your recommendation?
I would recommend using Power Query to read from the SharePoint list and the unpivot the data. You can install Power Query in Excel 2010 and Excel 2013. It ships with Excel 2016 named as Get & Transform. And Power Query is available in Power BI Desktop. It is probably a better choice for this than DAX.
Coming from the corporate data warehousing solutions world I found Power Pivot to be surprisingly functional tool that could help to bring BI into small bussiness. In order to educate myself in this area I'm doing a small project for a friend who is a building contractor and asked me to help analyse his costs against different projects. The issue is that some data needs to be provided by user and here is where my narrow knowledge of Power Pivot is starting to show up.
My base data is coming from accounting system. I have access to company books via SQL Server connection, I can import Invoices, Clients, Suppliers, Accounts and all other entries. I made all
the connections and can present data in an easy way in a Pivot table which alone impressed my friend a lot. I was impressed myself how easy and straightforward it was compared to some reporting tools like Microstrategy or Business Objects which I use every day.
What is missing in the accounting system is Project information, say Client has 3 houses which my friend is working on, each of them should be treated as a separate project that we want to calculate profit on. Do do that I need some manual input such as assigning Project to Cost invoice add a category (Materials, Services) etc.
Initially I wanted to create a two lookup spreadsheets:
Projects where project name, valid from/to, etc. would be entered manually (or imported from CRM application in the future) and Client which would be selected from a dropdown list (ideally sourced directly from the power pivot Client table)
QUESTION 1: how to add a dropdown list of Clients coming from Power Pivot table?
Invoice relation table which would hold some data from power pivot Cost Invoice table (invoice number, supplier, date etc.) and then a dropdown list with projects (from the first spreadsheet) and cost type. Tricky part is that I would like invoice list to be refreshed automatically when new invoices are registered but I don't want to loose any data added manually against them!
QUESTION 2: how to design such spreadsheet to be populating new invoices automatically but maintaining data linked with it? I was thinking PivotTable with some data next to it but it seems like a very volatile solution, say invoices are sorted by invoice number (which is different system or each supplier) and a new one can show up in the middle of the table, then all projects that were manually added after would start pointing to the wrong invoices.
Last resort for me is to create an MS Access database for storing/updating lookups but then all the mess with creating ODBC connections etc. comes into play and in my opinion it's defeating the idea of neat PowerPivot Excel spreadsheet...
Any ideas are welcome!
in general you can design an excel table that holds manual input data and feed that table into PowerPivot (via linked table).
as for the drop down info based on database data i suggest using power query. this tool lets you connect to various sources, do some data wrangling and then output that data into excel. these outputs can then serve as data range for excel based drop downs.
take a look at Power Query e.g.here: https://support.office.com/en-in/article/Introduction-to-Microsoft-Power-Query-for-Excel-6e92e2f4-2079-4e1f-bad5-89f6269cd605 or here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LACjRvxl_2w.
I am creating a tracking document for artists' accommodation as part of an arts festival and would like to automate part of my work flow. Whilst we use event management/scheduling software for confirmed bookings, it's nice to do all my working in Excel.
I would like to have a master sheet (sheet 1), with a full list of artists and their respective accommodation - that can then be sorted into individual sheets (sheet 2, 3 etc) based on the name of the accommodation. The automatic sorting would also capture the other pieces of information in the row.
This would allow for each different sheet to show a report on who is staying in each type of accommodation and would be rather handy!
I would recommend one or more PivotTables as a simpler solution. Here a PT and two clones are shown on your Master Sheet, but they could each be on their own sheet:
Accom is in Report Filter, Company is in Row Labels and PAX (as Sum) is in Σ Values. Once having clicked on PivotTable in Insert > Tables - PivotTable and having chosen you range ('Master Sheet'!$A$2:$C$7A2:C7) and Location just drag the fields from the big box to the little ones.
This is feasible using Excel, but I don't recommend it; it is creating a maintenance nightmare in the long run.
From the question I can't gather whether the data is available in some kind of event management software package; if so you can use that one as a data source. Or create an Access or SQL database with a few tables. After that, you can use one of the following options to make the necessary overviews and as many more as you think up during the project:
Use Excel with ODBC or web query to retrieve data aggregated and
sorted as you like. Make changes in the event management package
allowing others to see the same facts. Or do it in Access. When you
change one thing, it automatically propogates also into the Excel.
Similarly, you can use an Excel add-in such as Invantive
Control (caution I work at a supplier) to retrieve the data from
the database using SQL or a webservice, change it from within Excel and
then synchronize the changes back assuming you have write access.
A similar solution is available as SQL*XL. Probably there are others too.
If the solution must be Excel only, I would recommend using vertical/horizontal lookups with the Excel function vlookup / hlookup (Dutch: vert.zoeken, horiz.zoeken). These function perform reasonable with a small amount of data and performance can be improved by sorting. And they resemble SQL joins, so the database you get within Excel more easily conforms to the relational model.
I hope the event is successfull and the people enjoy it.
I'm creating an Excel dashboard that imports a variable number months' worth of financial/accounting information from a database to an Excel sheet. Using this information I have a Calculations sheet that computes some financial indicators, again, month by month. Finally, this information is displayed in graphs on a separate sheet (one indicator per graph, with the monthly information plotted to see the tendencies). Currently I have written VBA code that formats the sheets to accomodate the number of months requested, pull the data from the SQL server, and update the graphs. Since there are 53 indicators for each operation (6 operations), this process takes about 3 minutes.
Does anyone recommend a better way to do this? The current way 'works' but I've often thought that there must be a more efficient way to do this.
Thanks!
Chris
You could look at skipping out the excel part and using SQL server reporting services (SSRS). If you have ever used business objects or crystal reports its kind of the same thing and I would imagine would offer better performance than doing things in excel.