Business performance planning custom visuals

  • 10 minutes

Dynamics 365 Finance Business performance planning offers a specialized toolkit of seven custom Power BI visuals that are tailored to your financial planning needs. These custom visuals provide a comprehensive range of tools that add planning and financial reporting functions to Power BI. In this way, they streamline processes that were previously labor-intensive, and they provide insights and help you with informed decision making. Through intuitive controls and powerful functionality, the visuals transform financial planning by promoting accuracy, efficiency, and agility. Therefore, you can focus on strategic analysis instead of data manipulation.

The Business performance planning application visuals work together cohesively to create a "flow of work" that empowers you to enforce controls and approval processes. As a result, you can standardize your planning processes across the enterprise.

You can write back the planning and forecasting that you do in these visuals to the planning apps data repository (Dataverse). This capability ensures seamless integration of your planning data between Power BI and the application.

Matrix planning

The Matrix planning visual is the default visual in the Business performance planning application's toolkit of custom visuals. Use it to design comprehensive planning scenarios. After you publish these scenarios, the interactive planning reports and dashboards provide powerful capabilities for Power BI users across your organization.

Key features

With the key features of the Matrix planning visual, you can:

  • Enter data for planning or forecasting scenarios in a user-friendly, tabular format, directly on the Power BI report page.
  • Update data in the Business performance planning tables (Dataverse) through the write-back feature after you make changes in Power BI.
  • Plan at any level of detail and take advantage of the capability for drill-down into rows and columns together with top-down allocation capabilities.

Graphical planning

The Graphical planning visual offers a dynamic approach to planning. It allows you to interact with charts to fine-tune underlying values. As in the Matrix planning visual, you can create comprehensive plans through visual manipulation capabilities.

Key features

With the key features of the Graphical planning visual, you can:

  • Do planning and write-back to Business performance planning Dataverse tables by dragging bar chart or line chart elements.
  • Plan at any level of detail and take advantage of drill-down and top-down allocation capabilities.
  • Enter data as an absolute value or as a percentage of the total, which allows for a flexible planning approach.

Reporting

The Reporting visual is your go-to solution for generating polished financial reports in Power BI. By using its advanced row and column formatting, you can create comprehensive financial statements, such as cash flow statements, income statements, and balance sheets.

Key features

With the key features of the Reporting visual, you can:

  • Add subtotal and custom calculations anywhere on a report.
  • Produce polished, professional-looking presentations by using enhanced capabilities to format the data on your reports.
  • Include a view of variances on your reports to provide valuable insights into your financial data.

Table edit

You can use the Table edit visual to edit dimensional tables directly in Power BI. In this way, you enhance the efficiency of Business performance planning. This visual facilitates master data management and streamlines workflows so that financial planning is more agile and effective.

Key features

With the key features of the Table edit visual, you can:

  • Create budget planning or forecasting scenarios and versions to facilitate an agile planning process.
  • Create, update, or delete data in dimensional tables through bulk editing capabilities. Therefore, this visual helps save time and reduce effort.
  • Adapt to your organizational workflows, such as designing and implementing standardized approval workflows.

Variance

The Variance visual empowers you to enhance your variance analysis by offering customizable key performance indicator (KPI) cards and flexible visualization options. You can visualize variances through vertical or horizontal bar charts, and you can switch between absolute, relative, and waterfall variance displays. Additionally, this visual allows for in-depth category drill-down and offers custom tooltips for comprehensive insights.

Key features

With the key features of the Variance visual, you can:

  • Visualize discrepancies between budget and actuals to provide a clear view of where discrepancies exist and facilitate informed decision making.
  • Explore further into your analysis through transaction-level details that are stored in a dedicated Power BI table and enable comprehensive investigation.
  • Use sorted bar charts to quickly review key drivers behind variances. Therefore, they help with root cause analysis for future planning cycles.

Copy

With the Copy visual, you can transfer baseline data, including actuals or forecasts, into new planning or forecasting scenarios. The flexibility to select the level of detail during the copy process allows for precise scenario creation. For example, you can copy data from the previous year's actuals as the foundation for a new plan, regardless of whether it's a complete copy or has dimensional filters applied, so that data is copied only for a specific department or product.

Key features

With the key features of the Copy visual, you can:

  • Define specific dimension coordinates to copy and paste values from a source to a target. This visual ensures consistency and accuracy during scenario creation.
  • Create forecasts and budgets by building on historical actuals, helping to reduce redundancy and promote accuracy.
  • Develop multiple forecast scenarios by building a base case and copying permutations when you need them for comprehensive analysis.

Comments

Use the Comments visual to collect comments directly from a Power BI report or comments that users enter in the Matrix planning visual. The Comments visual serves as your all-in-one solution for gathering comments and facilitating collaborative feedback during the planning process.

Key features

With the key features of the Comments visual, you can:

  • Capture and store comments directly in your planning process to ensure that all feedback is centralized and accessible.
  • Help reviewers and approvers make faster decisions.
  • Take advantage of the visual's support of rich text formatting and embedded hyperlinks.