Announcing Power Platform Finance School

I recently did a talk titled ‘Why Accountants should love Power BI’ - I showed a few tips on how to build an income statement using the matrix visual/DAX, and ran a fair bit over my allotted time, but there was still so much more that I wanted to cover! This was because the use cases for, and benefits of Power BI within the finance function go so much further than I could do justice for in the time permitted.

Power BI is certainly one of the most significant driving forces in the data analytics industry in recent years, though has struggled to penetrate areas such as Finance. Whilst very data-driven, these areas are subject to internal and external regulatory/compliance constraints and require a certain degree of flexibility which as a data visualisation tool, Power BI has traditionally not been able to cater to.

 However, this has changed rapidly in the past year as Power BI now offers a larger degree of customisation as well as enterprise features which allow for the ‘Discipline at the core, flexibility at the edge’ that the finance function needs.

 Harnessing this into the area of Finance however requires technically-minded finance people to learn the technical elements of Power BI and understand how to apply their finance knowledge to it; alternatively BI professionals need to understand the language of finance and know how to apply the technology to the specific business requirements of the finance world. And that’s just Power BI – the wider Power Platform opens up even more opportunities in areas such as workflow automation (think e.g. period-end close!) and write-back, whilst Dynamics 365 and Azure provide the overall architecture that can power data-driven financial decisions in a way that accountants haven’t traditionally been able to deliver using spreadsheets or legacy ERP/Finance systems.

 Being a chartered accountant and having worked in a finance role myself (albeit a long time ago!), I’ve been acutely aware of this as I’ve been spending the last few years of my career honing my skills in Power BI. Thus, one of the user groups I’ve been running is Power Platform Finance (www.powerplatformfinance.com). We ran a couple of Face-to-Face workshops in 2019 and then last year moved online and ran 17 hugely successful webinars, with some of the best speakers on the planet (including MVPs such as Imke Feldman/Andrej Lapajne and experts such as Chris Hamil from the Power BI CAT team!), covering everything from visual design and modelling to D365 FinOps and custom visuals/add-ons. If you’re interested in this space and haven’t watched these sessions yet, I’d encourage you to do so – they’re excellent!

As we were nearing the end of the year, however, I started to feel as if there was something missing. It wasn’t the quality of the content or speakers - in fact a silver lining of lockdown has been an abundance of great technical content with so many user groups/conferences hosting their sessions online, and I’ve personally benefited from watching sessions/recordings hosted on the other side of the globe that I wouldn't have otherwise had been able to attend!

It dawned on me that whilst we’ve all had lots of choice with online video content, we’ve missed out on the opportunities for hands-on education in a small intimate classroom environment, which I believe is where the real magic of learning happens: Not just watching someone show the “art of the possible”, but also then getting our hands dirty and trying these processes ourselves. Having this opportunity face-to-face is great (but isn’t going to happen right now) and also has its constraints in terms of who can attend due to geographic constraints.

So I’m excited to announce PPF School 2021, where our team will run 12 free virtual fortnightly classroom workshop sessions (every two weeks) over 6 months this year with a small group (8-10 people). In each session we will go through a comprehensive worked example covering an element of financial reporting with Power BI - see the proposed syllabus here.

Across all the sessions, we will aim for a balance of breadth and depth across Power BI covering topics including data preparation/ingestion, data modelling, DAX and visualisation. We will look to cover “advanced” topics such as ragged hierarchies and calculation groups in addition to more mainstream features such as conditional formatting and report layout.

The aim of this course is to take the BI/Finance professional on a journey of leveraging Power BI to its full potential, including taking advantage of Enterprise features such as dataflows/shared datasets as well as third-party tools and custom visuals.

We’re targeting this initial course to those who have a fair amount of experience already with Power BI though perhaps struggle to know how to apply it in a finance scenario (it isn’t obvious!). The plan is to then make the content available to a wider audience through videos and other media so don’t worry if you don’t fit the profile or are unable to commit to attending the full course this time around!

This is by no means just me – PPF now has a really strong team of facilitators and content producers to help deliver the course including:

·      Chris Barber – one of the newest Data Platform MVPs (Congratulations Chris!) who has been working in a finance role for several years before joining moving over to the world of consulting last year

·      Kyle Mueller – an experienced and hugely passionate Power BI Consultant and trainer based in Rhode Island, US

·      Alp Akdeniz - a certified Microsoft Power BI professional based in New York, with prior experience working in Corporate Finance for CA Technologies, Intrado, and Broadridge Financial Solutions

·      Naveen Ganpat – A credit analyst currently working in the Treasury function of a challenger bank in the UK

·      Rajan Chavda – One of Avanade’s UK’s most recent employees having joined from KPMG where he was recognised as one of their most prominent Power BI experts!

I’m sure you’ll agree that this is a fantastic team of organisers and we’re excited to contribute to - and learn lots from! - the PPF community this year.

Interested in being on the first cohort? Apply on our re-branded Power Platform Finance site!

In either case, reach out to me (send me a message on LinkedIn!) if you have any ideas of content/specific scenarios to cover or any non-sensitive finance datasets that you can share. I’m keen for this to be an initiative that is run by and for the community so please do get involved however you can!