I'm an Accountant - Why Am I Interested in Power BI?

Having a long career in financial reporting, I started using Power BI tools before the very first version was called Power BI. While I wrote this article in 2022, it remains as relevant today as it did when I wrote it. It's original publication was on The Woodard Report

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​Many years ago I worked with the accounting department of a semiconductor manufacturing equipment company. The board wanted the accounting team to give them a tool to get better information on how they could see the impact of different choices they were facing with regard to inventory levels.

As an example, if they invested in more inventory how would that impact the balance sheet and income statement? If they aimed at inventory turns of 1% more or less, how would that change financials? Back in 2000, getting information like that to display meant that I had to employ my programming skills to pull data out of the accounting system and feed it to a graphics package.

That was the start of my interest in analytics and reporting, an interest that grew until I built a business specifically around transforming QuickBooks data into actionable information. And I invest my energy into our industry by providing training to other accountants and bookkeepers just like you. For example, this year I'll be teaching "Introduction to Power BI" at this year's Scaling New Heights conference in June in Orlando. For more information on my session and the other more than 100 sessions that will be offered, you can view the training schedule here. 

What Is Power BI?
Power BI is an enterprise business intelligence platform, This scalable platform allows you to connect to all of your data sources with the scale to analyze, share, and promote insights across your business while retaining data accuracy, consistency, and security.

What Does Power BI Do? 
Today, the same kind of information that used to require serious programming skills can be generated with ZERO programming knowledge by using Power BI. Of course, it’s important to know that Microsoft didn’t create Power BI overnight but has been at this for decades, and it shows!

Simply put (and as Microsoft describes it), Power BI bridges the gap between data and decision-making. 

In the enterprise software world, an organization known as Gartner has made a business out of taking a deep dive into various solutions areas and providing a detailed analysis at a cost. Their analysis is widely recognized as being the "gold standard" for understanding what the best solutions are for a given market. In Gartner's analysis of Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms, Power BI has been the leader for many years.