AI in Financial Reporting

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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...
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USERELATIONSHIP in DAX

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A common problem many users face it the fact that there are multiple date fields in their tables, and when they want to use a date dimension, Power BI only allows for on active relationship between the two tables.

For example, I have a dimension table from my leasing software that included information on each lease including the commencement date of the lease and the expiration date of the lease.  In Power BI when I use a separate date dimension (which I always recommend for many different reasons), I can only link the dimension table to date table with one active relationship.   See screen shot below.




Since most of my visualizations will be based on the Commencement Date, I will make that the active relationship.  However, I would like to create a visualization showing my leases by expiration date.  In order to do this, I have a couple options.

1.       I could create a second date dimension table in my model.  This is fairly simple.  I would just copy the first dimension and give it a new name (Expiration Date).  I would relate the Lease Details table to the Expiration Date table using the expiration date.  The drawback to this is if you are using date slicers on the report, you would need two different date slicers since they are different tables.  This can also quickly get out of control if there are numerous dates.

2.       I could use the DAX function USERELATIONSHIP.

Userelationship([columnName1],[columnName2])

The function returns no value; the function only enables the indicated relationship for the duration of the calculation.

By using this function I can create a new measure to count my leases based on their expiration date.

Expiring Leases = CALCULATE(DISTINCTCOUNT('Lease Details'[Lease]),USERELATIONSHIP('Lease Details'[ExpirationDate],'Date'[Date]))

Once this measure is in place, I can create my two different visualization using the same date dimension.





For more information on USERELATIONSHIP go to https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/query-bi/dax/userelationship-function-dax


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