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Showing posts from July, 2017

AI in Financial Reporting

It has been a while since I posted, but I have been getting a lot of questions lately from clients and from my accounting students about the same topic:  Where does AI actually belong in the financial reporting process?  Everyone wants to know if they should be using it, and the honest answer is that it depends a lot on which part of the process you are talking about. I have been working with several clients on this over the last few months, plus I have an upcoming speaking session on AI in reporting, so I thought I would put some of these thoughts together here. For each point, I am also going to push back on myself a little, because I think that is a more useful way to think through this than just picking a side. Where AI is actually helping right now The clearest win I have seen is variance analysis. AI tools are good at scanning through a large number of GL lines and flagging the ones that look different from what history would predict. Think of a vendor payment that...

Small Multiples in Power BI

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I have been spending the past few months getting more familiar with Power BI.   There is a lot of information available, but it is sometimes hard to find exactly what I am looking for.   As I have been creating reports and visualizations in Power BI, one thing I have been missing is “small multiples”.   For those that are not familiar with the term “small multiples”, it is sometimes called a trellis chart, lattice chart, grid chart or panel chart.   It is a series of similar charts using the same scale and axes, allowing them to easily be compared.   The advantage is that it uses multiple views to show different dimensions of the dataset. This is a visualization many other tools have, but until yesterday I have not been able to create them in Power BI.   As I mentioned there is a lot of information available for Power BI, and there are also a lot of custom visualizations available.   I had looked in the Office Store before, and I had searched sm...