- Keep the close-and-consolidation platform as the single source of truth and put Power BI on top purely for presentation rather than rebuilding the financials.
- Row-level security lets one report and one data model show each audience only the rows their role permits, instead of maintaining a dozen drifting spreadsheets.
- Shareholders, board members, and operating-company executives can each get their own slice off the same numbers.
- Designing the board view for the reader, with cash on hand and year-to-date net income on a tablet, is what gets these dashboards used instead of ignored.
This week, the controller at a multi-entity holding company explained why their new financial-consolidation platform still left them unhappy: the built-in dashboards were, in their word, "subpar," and the board wanted something they could hold on a tablet during a meeting.
That combination, a solid data platform with weak presentation, is one of the most common reasons companies bring in Power BI, Microsoft's reporting tool.
Let the consolidation platform do the math, let Power BI do the showing
The clean architecture keeps the close-and-consolidation platform as the single source of truth and puts Power BI on top of it for presentation. You don't rebuild the financials. You build the view of them that a board actually wants to look at, and you can pipe in the occasional second feed, like parent-company cash on hand from Business Central, to replace a manually emailed daily spreadsheet.
The real requirement: everyone sees their own slice
The hard part of board and shareholder reporting isn't the charts. It's that different audiences are allowed to see different things off the same numbers:
- Shareholders see the full family view.
- Board members see a limited view.
- Operating-company executives see only their own entity.
This is a textbook case for row-level security: one report, one data model, but each person only sees the rows their role permits. It's the difference between building one governed report and maintaining a dozen separate spreadsheets that drift apart the moment someone changes a number.
Build it for the reader, not the analyst
A board deck and an analyst's workbook are different products. The board wants a bird's-eye view, cash on hand, period revenue, year-to-date net income, that replaces a hundred-plus pages, and they want it on a phone or tablet while they travel. Designing for that audience, rather than for a finance power user, is what makes these dashboards get used instead of printed and ignored.
If you've got good financial data trapped behind dashboards nobody enjoys reading, a board-ready reporting layer is usually a quick, high-impact project. We're glad to scope it with you. Let's talk it through.