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Showing posts from January, 2018

AI in Financial Reporting

It has been a while since I posted, but I have been getting a lot of questions lately from clients and from my accounting students about the same topic:  Where does AI actually belong in the financial reporting process?  Everyone wants to know if they should be using it, and the honest answer is that it depends a lot on which part of the process you are talking about. I have been working with several clients on this over the last few months, plus I have an upcoming speaking session on AI in reporting, so I thought I would put some of these thoughts together here. For each point, I am also going to push back on myself a little, because I think that is a more useful way to think through this than just picking a side. Where AI is actually helping right now The clearest win I have seen is variance analysis. AI tools are good at scanning through a large number of GL lines and flagging the ones that look different from what history would predict. Think of a vendor payment that...

Showing the last 12 months based on a date slicer

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When working with financial and sales data, clients often ask for charts showing the last 12 months of data.  This is actually very simple using relative date filtering. In addition, they might ask to compare to the same month last year.  With a simple DAX calculation (SAMEPERIODLASTYEAR) it is possible to add this measure. Here is the formula: Same Month Last Year = CALCULATE(Sum(Sales[SalesAmount]),SAMEPERIODLASTYEAR('Date'[Datekey])) For many users this is all they need.  The chart will update each month and they will always be able to see the last 12 months.   However, this chart will not work with date slicers.   If the client adds a date slicer to the page and selects just one month, the chart will be limited to one month. The reason the chart is limited to one month is because the date dimension relates to the sales fact table and it filters the data for the selected month. Howe...