Lower your expectations, or risk being disappointed
SUMMARY
This article outlines the main challenges finance professionals face when starting to use Microsoft Power BI.
Reading time: 2 minutes 35 seconds
When the excitement fades: what finance professionals discover along the way
For corporate finance professionals, Power BI is often seen as a modern reporting solution, attractive for its dynamic visuals and promises of automation. The initial excitement is real: finally, a tool to visualize data in a more engaging way than complex Excel spreadsheets. However, as they move forward, many professionals discover the tool’s limitations and growing complexity. What seemed simple quickly becomes a full-fledged technical project, requiring time, advanced IT skills, and a restructuring of the reporting process. These underestimated challenges can stifle motivation and increase dependence on IT resources.
Challenge #1: Unexpected rigidity limits flexibility
At first glance, Power BI appears to offer creative freedom, but users quickly discover its limitations: every visualization is fixed within a structure that is hard to modify without technical expertise. Unlike Excel, where you can easily add a comment line or drag a formula, Power BI requires complex and often counterintuitive manipulations.
To reduce this rigidity, an alternative is to use Power BI with a pre-structured financial dataset connected to a centralized analytical financial model. This gives users access to standard KPIs, hierarchies, and relevant filters without needing to configure them manually. Reports can then be built within a finance-friendly framework, instead of struggling with the tool’s constraints.
Challenge #2: A difficult technical skill gap to bridge
Power BI requires learning languages like DAX and M, along with understanding relational data models. These are IT-related skills, which finance professionals are typically not trained in. The gap creates frustration: to perform even a basic calculation, users must write a DAX measure, understand context filters, and troubleshoot a complex model.
To address this challenge, some solutions offer a complete dataset with all the necessary DAX measures already configured for common finance needs: budget variances, YTD calculations, consolidations, and more. This removes the need to learn a complex language and allows finance professionals to focus on analysis—their core expertise.
Challenge #3: Underestimated personal time investment
There are many Power BI training courses available, but they rarely make users fully autonomous in real-world financial scenarios. It’s only during actual use that the difficulties become apparent: relationship creation, data cleaning, security management—all take far more time than expected. The personal time investment often exceeds initial expectations by a wide margin.
To minimize this burden, some solutions provide a ready-to-use environment: an enriched, validated, and structured dataset, with data sources already integrated. This dramatically shortens the onboarding process and enables users to quickly generate usable reports—without the long modeling and transformation phases.
Conclusion
The SwiftFinance FP&A solution removes the most frustrating barriers finance professionals encounter in Power BI. By providing a pre-existing dataset enriched with all relevant DAX measures for financial reporting—and connected to a centralized analytical financial model—it transforms Power BI into an immediately operational tool. No need to become a modeling expert or waste time deciphering the tool’s technical logic: users can produce, analyze, and share reports quickly, with maximum reliability and clarity.
Make your life easier
Finally publish your financial information in Power BI without relying on experts — starting now!
Make the right choice with the EXIA Swift Finance solution.
Finance professionals – Power BI expectations vs. reality