Microsoft Power BI

Business Intelligence (BI) is the practice of turning raw data into answers you can act on. It covers the full journey — collecting data from different systems, shaping it into a consistent model, and presenting it as clear dashboards that explain what happened, why it happened, and what to do next.

The Value and Complexity of Business Intelligence

The value of BI is focus and speed. When everyone sees the same, up-to-date metrics, meetings shift from debating numbers to deciding actions. Controllers close faster, managers spot trends earlier, and teams align on goals because KPIs are defined once and reused everywhere.

The challenge is complexity. Data lives in many places — ERP, CRM, spreadsheets, webshops, and databases — each with its own definitions and timing. Manually stitching these sources together creates version conflicts, delays, and errors. Even small differences (e.g., how “Revenue” is calculated) can derail decision-making.

Managing complexity with Power BI

Power BI connects to multiple data sources, cleans and combines them, and gives you an interactive, governed layer for analysis. Instead of building one-off slide decks, you publish live dashboards that refresh on schedule and can be securely shared with the right people.

One important limitation of Power BI

Out of the box, Power BI is read-oriented — great for exploring and visualizing data, not for writing changes back to your database (e.g., entering budgets, adjusting forecasts, or editing master data) directly inside a report. If you need that, the fix is simple: add a Power BI writeback add-on. These apps let authorized users input data within the dashboard and securely persist it to the source system — ideal for planning, forecasting, and master data management — without breaking governance.

For teams that live and breathe numbers — like finance, controlling, and FP&A — Power BI dashboards can be a game-changer. Instead of juggling spreadsheets, slide decks, and emailed updates, you get a single interactive dashboard that refreshes automatically and brings all your KPIs into one place.

A well-designed financial dashboard can track everything from revenue and costs to margin, cash flow, and budget variances. The real strength lies in how easy it is to explore: click on a month, region, or product line, and the entire dashboard updates instantly. This makes reviews faster, and it helps teams move from simply reporting numbers to understanding the story behind them.

Visualizations make insights clear at a glance. A line chart highlights sales trends over time, a waterfall explains the movement in EBIT, and KPI cards show whether you’re on or off track. Instead of scanning rows in Excel, you can spot patterns, anomalies, and opportunities immediately.

The screenshot illustrates how multiple perspectives — such as Actual vs. Budget, regional performance, or top expense categories — can live in a single, interactive view.

Example: Imagine your monthly performance meeting. Instead of walking through dozens of slides, the CFO opens a live Power BI dashboard. With one click, the team drills into Europe’s Q2 results, sees that Germany is driving most of the variance, and identifies a drop in margin tied to higher logistics costs. The discussion instantly shifts from “what happened?” to “what do we do next?” — all in the same meeting, without waiting for new reports to be prepared.

Although this example comes from finance, the same approach applies across the business: sales teams can track pipelines, operations can monitor supply chains, and HR can analyze workforce trends. Still, finance often leads the way — because when financial insights are clearer and faster, every part of the organization benefits.

For finance teams, this means less manual consolidation, fewer versioning issues, and more time for analysis and planning. In practice, Power BI doesn’t just make reporting prettier — it makes it faster, smarter, and more collaborative.

Power BI Free

The free version of Power BI is ideal for individuals who want to get started. With Power BI Desktop, you can connect to multiple data sources, create models, and build interactive reports — all without paying a cent. The limitation is that you can’t share dashboards with others or use cloud collaboration features. It’s perfect for personal use, testing out the platform, or building reports you later plan to share in a Pro or Premium environment.

Power BI Pro

Most organizations start with Power BI Pro. At a low monthly subscription cost per user, Pro unlocks the ability to:

• Share dashboards and reports via the Power BI Service
• Collaborate with colleagues in shared workspaces
• Schedule data refreshes in the cloud
• Export and embed content into other Microsoft tools like Teams and SharePoint

Pro is designed for teams that want to move away from emailing spreadsheets and instead rely on live, shared dashboards.

Power BI Premium

For larger organizations — or teams with big data needs — Power BI Premium provides enterprise-grade capacity. With Premium, you can:

• Handle larger datasets (up to 400 GB per model)
• Refresh data more frequently (up to 48 times per day)
• Use advanced AI and dataflows
• Distribute content broadly, even to users without Pro licenses (via Premium capacity)
• Choose between Premium Per User (PPU) for advanced features on an individual level, or Premium Capacity for organization-wide deployment.

Premium is the right choice when you need scale, governance, and performance — for example, when hundreds of managers across the globe need access to the same consolidated dashboards.

Which option should you choose?

If you’re just getting started, the Free version is more than enough to explore Power BI and experiment with building reports. As soon as you want to collaborate and share dashboards with colleagues, Pro becomes the natural choice — it covers the needs of most small and medium-sized teams. For larger organizations, or for advanced users working with big and complex datasets, Premium provides the scale, performance, and flexibility required to support enterprise-wide analytics.

The best part is that you can start small and scale up. Many businesses begin with Pro licenses and move to Premium once adoption spreads and reporting needs grow.

Microsoft Power BI has become one of the most widely used business intelligence tools for a reason. It makes it easy to connect different data sources, clean and consolidate them, and present the results in interactive dashboards and reports that anyone in the organization can use. For finance teams, this means faster reporting cycles and more time spent on analysis. For managers and executives, it means having reliable KPIs at their fingertips to guide decisions.

The real value of Power BI lies in its ability to replace scattered spreadsheets and disconnected reports with a single version of the truth. When everyone works from the same data, conversations shift from “which number is correct?” to “what action should we take?”.

That said, it’s also important to recognize Power BI’s main limitation: it is a read-oriented tool. While it excels at analyzing and visualizing data, it doesn’t allow you to write back changes — like entering budgets, updating forecasts, or editing master data — directly inside reports. For many organizations, this creates a gap between reporting and planning.

The good news is that this gap can be closed with Power BI writeback add-ons. These apps extend Power BI beyond visualization, allowing teams to input data directly into dashboards while keeping everything secure and integrated with the underlying database. For finance and planning teams, this means the same place you review numbers can also be the place you update them.

In short: Power BI is the ideal foundation for modern business intelligence, and with the right add-ons, it can become a powerful platform for planning and decision-making as well. Curious about the flexibility and value writeback provides?