Power BI as a Reporting Automation tool

Power BI is not just a data visualization tool but also a reporting automation tool!

How is it a reporting automation tool?

Let me elaborate.

Every company will have multiple business functions like Sales, Marketing, Finance, HR, etc. Each of these functions has its own business processes. Every business process will in turn have its data entry/collection mechanism. It could be either manual or automatic. Thus a large amount of data is being collected/generated and stored in different data sources by these different departments every single day.

To evaluate the performance of any business process with respect to another, we would need to download the data of both these processes from different sources manually (normally as Excel files), manipulate the data in such a way it’s ready for analysis, and finally interpret the results.
Let’s say this analysis is a recurring one (monthly/quarterly), it consumes a lot of man hours for this task.

This is where Power BI comes in handy. Power BI can connect to different data sources, establish relationships between them based on common fields and then build the visuals using the combined data sources.

It can be as simple as creating a table visual with appropriate filters. The business user can simply apply the filters and export the records shown in the table visual as an Excel file. The best part of this is that these reports can be refreshed at regular intervals of time automatically, so the business user gets to see the most updated data every time they open the report.

Earlier this same process of generating a single excel file comparing 2 different processes had a lot of manual intervention.

Now, Power BI became a one-time solution to automate recurring reporting processes.

Thus, Power BI is a reporting automation tool too.

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