Finvalda and Power BI: automated reports without manual exports

Finvalda keeps accounting data in good order, but reporting needs usually reach beyond accounting itself. The managing director wants to see profitability by department, the sales manager wants to follow customer trends, and the owner wants a comparison across several years.

The usual approach is to export to Excel and process the data by hand every month. Power BI lets you do the same work once, after which the reports refresh on their own.

What changes in an accountant’s work

In practice the change is simple: month-end report preparation disappears.

Instead of gathering data, formatting tables and checking formulas, you find the reports already prepared. Your work stays where it adds the most value: making sure the data in Finvalda is entered correctly.

The second change is that you no longer have to answer the same questions over and over. The managing director or a department head opens the report and finds the answer themselves, without waiting for someone to put together a summary.

Which reports you get

The ready-built Finvalda package includes the reports most companies need:

• an executive summary: revenue, expenses, profit, margin and liquidity;
• revenue and expense analysis, compared with the previous year and with budget;
• profit analysis by department;
• revenue and expense changes, with drill-down to general ledger accounts;
• reports on outstanding debts and late payments;
• the balance sheet and the profit and loss statement, with comparisons across several years.

What you need to connect

You need read access to the Finvalda database and one person who can explain how your accounting is set up: how departments are tagged, how product groups are structured, and how discounts and returns are recorded.

Nothing needs to change in Finvalda itself: the reports read the data, they do not write to it.

How automatic refresh works

Data is pulled from Finvalda on a schedule, usually once a night, so the report is ready first thing in the morning. If you need a faster rhythm, the refresh can be set to run several times a day.

It is important to understand what this means in practice: the report shows what has been entered in Finvalda. If invoices are posted several days late, the report inherits that delay. Analytics does not fix data quality; it only makes it visible, and that is often the first benefit.

The second common surprise is that accounting errors come to light sooner. An invoice posted to the wrong place gets lost in an annual report, but on a monthly chart it stands out straight away as an anomaly.

What to sort out before you start

Implementation goes more smoothly if a few questions are answered beforehand:

• How departments are tagged. If cost objects are not assigned consistently everywhere, the breakdown by department will be inaccurate.
• How product groups are structured. Analysis by group is only as good as the consistency with which the groups have been entered.
• How discounts and returns are recorded. The margin calculation depends on it.
• Who needs to see what. A department head usually needs only the data for their own unit.

None of these is an obstacle to getting started; they simply determine whether the first version of the reports is accurate from day one.

What this changes at month-end close

A typical month-end close looks like this: documents are entered, balances are checked, and then reports are prepared for management. That last step often takes the most time.

With automated reports, only the first two steps remain. The third happens by itself, and the accountant’s work shifts from preparing summaries to ensuring the data is correct, which is something nobody else can do.

We have described how to move away from manual spreadsheets in practice in a separate article, and how long the whole implementation takes here.

Where to start

The choice depends on how many reports you need: Finvalda Basic covers 8 core reports, while Finvalda PRO covers 20, including customer, product profitability and supplier analysis. You will find prices on the pricing page, and you can see what the reports look like in the examples.