Profitbase Profitbase Profitbase Profitbase
  • Om oss
  • Blogg
  • Karriere
  • Norsk Norsk
    • en EN
  • Bestill en demo
  • Products
    • Budsjett og prognose
    • Risikostyring
    • Konsolidering
    • Power BI Visuals
      • Financial Reporting Matrix
      • Power BI Gantt Chart
  • Customers
    • Våre kunder
    • Kundehistorier
  • Partnere
  • Ressurser
    • Guides
    • Profitbase…d on a true story
    • Videoer
    Hjem Blogg Building the Financial Reporting Matrix

    Building the Financial Reporting Matrix

    august 26, 2021
    Tore Senneseth
    Tore Senneseth
    Head of Research and Development
    linkedin image
    Profitbase staff working on ideas for the Financial Reporting Matrix

    Profitbase’s product manager Anders Aano (right) and head of development Tore Senneseth (left) spark ideas on the Financial Reporting Matrix for Power BI.

     

    This article aims to tell why and how we built the Financial Reporting Matrix and how it “accidentally” grew into an international success. We hope it might be an interesting read about how a product can come to life, given the right opportunity, competency, and timing … sprinkled with a little bit of luck.

    Spotting an opportunity

    It all started in late 2018 when our Data Platform and Power BI consultancy teams faced challenges in delivering purposeful financial reporting to customers using Power BI. It was, and still is, impossible to create proficient financial reports and statements using only the built-in Power BI visuals. They pitched the idea of developing a custom visual for creating great financial statements to the software development team. Still, we had other priorities at the time, and the entire team was busy working on another product.

    Given the low cost per user on the Power BI platform, our concern was customers’ willingness to pay for such a visual. Would we gain a return on investment? Another major concern was that Microsoft’s Power BI team could improve the built-in matrix or create a new visual for this purpose, leaving our work worthless overnight.

    Power BI was, and still is, being rapidly developed, so if this feature were so important, we believed that Microsoft would address the issue rather quickly.

    Based on all these uncertainties, we decided not to move forward with development at the time. The idea was not dismissed, though. During the next six months, it became evident that Microsoft was not prioritizing the issue. The Power BI consulting team kept bringing the idea up as it prevented them from delivering the best possible services to their customers.

    The decision

    A few members of the software development team started investigating what effort it would take to develop an MVP (minimum viable product) that would include the features that the Power BI consulting team was looking for. At Profitbase, we developed and sold our own reporting tool for years, so we had extensive experience building these types of table/matrix visualizations for financial reporting.

    We also had a calculation framework from a different product that would enable users to write custom formulas using a familiar Excel-like syntax instead of DAX. We didn’t, however, have any experience with the Power BI platform or developing Power BI custom visuals, so the Power BI programming model was new to us. In the end, our guesstimate was that it would take about 1.5 months to develop the first version, allocating only a single developer full-time for the job.

    Because it required so little effort and was a tool that was needed internally, we decided to go ahead. We were still uncertain whether the visual would be profitable as a standalone product, but we figured it could function as a marketing tool to draw attention to our other products and services since this feature was clearly lacking from Power BI. Hence, others were most likely facing similar challenges.

    Free vs. paid?

    We debated whether to make the visual free or paid and ended up initially making it free for the following main reasons:

    • It was a tool that we needed internally for both our consultancy service and if we were going to build software products on top of Power BI later.
    • We wanted fast adoption by the Power BI community and our partners.
    • Market potential and willingness to pay for this kind of visual were uncertain to us. We wanted to see how it performed before spending resources on setting up an online payment solution and involving other parts of the organization.
    • If you charge for a product, you also commit to supporting and maintaining it regardless of getting one or 1000 customers. If the visual got poor adoption outside our own organization, we wanted the option to quickly terminate it as a supported product.

    The first release

    The first version was completed within two months, primarily by a single developer, with some assistance from the Power BI consulting team for creating sample data and testing. The visual was available on AppSource a few months later and received a very warm welcome from the Power BI community. We created a YouTube video demonstrating the features, and people were highly enthusiastic in their comments – including one claiming the solution was “f**king amazing.» Therefore, YouTube started requiring age verification to watch the video … we thought it was pretty funny 🙂

    We used GitHub to talk to our users, and it proved to be a supportive and great communication tool. We chose Github because it is freely available to anyone, has issue tracking/discussion boards, a wiki (for documentation), release management (downloads) and an API which lets us automate things.

    We started developing version 2 because of the significant uptake and enthusiastic welcoming the visual received from the community, combined with great feature requests coming in. It was completed in January 2020 and made available from GitHub only. We never released it to AppSource because we experimented with features that might be breaking in the next planned version, so we didn’t want to put it on AppSource, where everyone would get it automatically.

    Turning point

    The visual kept getting a great deal of attention from the community, but we didn’t immediately start planning version 3 because we were busy doing other things. Then, in February 2020, one of the world’s largest consulting firms contacted us. They were building a platform based on Power BI but could not provide smart financial reports that satisfied their high standards. Our visual was the closest they had to finding something that solved their problem, but some essential features were missing, so they reached out to see if we were open to get these features added to the visual.

    We jumped on the opportunity to get the visual incorporated into the organization of such a big player. After some quick online meetings to better understand their needs, the people in charge of the project flew in for a two-day workshop so we could get to know each other and iron out the details. It was important to us that, even though they had specific needs, the features that were added to the visual had to be applicable to others as well.

     

    Profitbase development team meeting

    At Profitbase, we’re also experts in juggling life and work to deliver solutions.

     

    During the workshop, we agreed on the features as well as the financial terms of the deal. This marked a turning point for the visual. Until then, the visual had been a side project for us where we occasionally allocated some resources to development and pushed out new releases. We had now entered into an agreement, which meant that our primary customer switched from internal to external and the visual changed from an experiment to a supported product.

    After the talks with “Big Corp” and looking at the features we were going to add, we realized that we should monetize on the visual. The features we were adding were a part of the deal with “Big Corp,” so giving them away for free to other customers was not an option. It also became clear that there were no other visuals that matched our product’s capabilities. Most of these new features went into a paid Premium tier.

     

    What was our philosophy?

    Our philosophy when deciding whether a feature should go in the free or Premium tier is that our customers should be able to create excellent financial statements using only the free features.

    “We believe that the free features should cover 100% of the must-have requirements for 80% of the customers.”

    The Premium tier’s features are for advanced scenarios or features that accelerate the development of financial reports in Power BI. In addition, running the visual within any embedded environment requires a Premium license. The reasoning behind this is that embedding usually means some kind of product running on top of Power BI, and it’s only fair that we should receive suitable compensation if our visual is an enabler for a paid product. Developers also benefit because they purchase both support and the assurance that the visual is developed and maintained by us.

    Scaling up development

    Turning the visual into an officially supported product also meant that we needed to scale up the development and do it quickly. All our developers were committed to our low-code platform, which underpins our Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) suite of products, and they could not be reallocated.

    Would you like to read more?

    You can find out more about how Tore and his team scaled up the development of the solution by reading the full blog article on Tore’s LinkedIn page. There, you can also learn how the team built a strong and reliable system, successfully launching it to the global market.

    There, you can connect with Tore and ask him questions you have on the work his team has created.

     

    >> Read the rest of this article

     

    Building the Financial Reporting Matrix - content image

    We aim to exceed expectations, execute with passion, and empower each other.

    Share:
    image image image
    Tags:
    Business IntelligenceEPMLow Code

    Abonner på nyhetsbrevet til Profitbase

    Kvartalmessig nyhetsbrev som inneholder verdifull informasjon om planlegging og analyse

    Abonner
    Related Insights
    Mange har lenge etterspurt denne funksjonen – og nå er den her
    Blogg
    februar 6, 2023 Mange har lenge etterspurt denne funksjonen – og nå er den her
    TOPP 3-listen over hvorfor rullerende prognoser er bedre enn «tradisjonell» budsjettering
    Blogg
    januar 18, 2023 TOPP 3-listen over hvorfor rullerende prognoser er bedre enn «tradisjonell» budsjettering
    The need for speed: Løsningen på dilemmaet om gjennomtenkte versus gjennomførte beslutninger
    Blogg
    januar 12, 2023 The need for speed: Løsningen på dilemmaet om gjennomtenkte versus gjennomførte beslutninger
    Profitbase
    • Stokkamyrveien 13, 4313 Sandnes
    • Martin Linges vei 25, 1364 Fornebu, Oslo
    • Privacy Policy
    • Karriere
    • Motta nyhetsbrevet vårt!
    • Opphavsrettserklæring

    Følg oss:

    • twitter
    • youtube
    • linkedin
    • facebook
    © 2022 Profitbase
    Profitbase
    • Products
      • Budsjett og prognose
      • Risikostyring
      • Konsolidering
      • Power BI Visuals
        • Financial Reporting Matrix
        • Power BI Gantt Chart
    • Customers
      • Våre kunder
      • Kundehistorier
    • Partnere
    • Ressurser
      • Guides
      • Profitbase…d on a true story
      • Videoer
    • Om oss
    • Blogg
    • Karriere
    • Norsk Norsk
      • en EN
    Profitbase
    • Bestill en demo
    We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.Ok