How Copilot in Power BI and Power Automate eliminated three days of manual monthly reporting for a CFO's team — delivering real-time financial intelligence with zero human intervention.
The finance team manually pulled data from the ERP, three Excel workbooks, and a SharePoint list each month — reconciling figures, formatting reports, and emailing PDFs to leadership. The process took 3 full days, was highly error-prone, and left executives without any real-time visibility into budget performance between reporting cycles.
Connected Power BI directly to the ERP via SQL Server, Excel files via SharePoint connector, and the budget workbook via Power Query — eliminating all manual exports and ensuring a single, always-current source of truth.
Budget Variance % =
DIVIDE(
[Actual Amount] - [Budget Amount],
[Budget Amount],
0
)
YTD Variance =
CALCULATE(
[Budget Variance %],
DATESYTD('Date'[Date])
)
A comprehensive DAX model with YTD, MTD, prior-year comparisons, variance calculations, and department-level drill-through — all updating automatically on refresh.
Enabled Copilot in Power BI to generate plain-English executive summaries of each month's financial performance, automatically highlighting key variances and trends — no analyst required to write the commentary.
Power Automate schedules monthly PDF exports of the paginated scorecard and delivers them to leadership via Teams and email. Zero manual intervention from the finance team.