Interactive PowerBI: Commercial P&L
The business problem: In most companies, financial data and commercial sales data live in separate systems, are owned by different teams, and rarely reconcile to the same number. This creates confusion, erodes trust, and makes it nearly difficult to answer the most basic question: which customers, products, or markets are actually profitable?
What this solves: This tool bridges the gap between Sales and Finance by integrating item-level sales data with top-level financial adjustments into a single unified P&L reconciling to the penny. Any P&L — by customer, product, time period, market, etc is available on demand, without waiting on a team or working from an offline spreadsheet.
What follows: A walkthrough of how the tool is structured, the Sales-to-Finance reconciliation, and how to generate customized P&L views across any dimension of the business.
The Profit & Loss dashboard is designed for business stakeholders to easily understand and discern fiscal performance across multiple/customized areas of the company.
In many companies financial data is highly sensitive in the sense that there are offline trackers and limited access to proprietary information. There is a gap between sales & marketing teams and financial departments. Oftentimes numbers that sales & marketing teams report are not the same as finance numbers due to top-level adjustments, differences in hierarchy classifications, or unintegrated entities.
This report is unique in the sense that it is designed with sales information at the item-level and fills the difference (positive or negative) between the financial information so that there is full transparency between the two. There is a customer called “Top-Level Adj” which represents the financial gap in data between sales and finance so that the P&L will match to the penny the finance info. The other customer info is all sales based.
Companies face challenges in generating customer-level P&Ls, as financial data normally aligns with the product hierarchy only. This report allows users to generate whatever P&L they desire - whether it is by time, customer, product, or a combination.
Using the Breakdown By X dropdown you can select the type of P&L you want to generate. For example, the default is by month but if you select Product-H1 then it will generate a P&L by the first level of the hierarchy (Beverages, Food, & Pet Supplies). Users can also select the market (US vs Canada), the unit display, the currency, the customer, and the product hierarchy.
With these selections - sales, marketing, and finance teams can answer nearly any business question, such as: “Which Breakfast food is most profitable at Drugmart”?