These sorts of insights and analyses have historically been the domain of bespoke accounting software packages and customized internal systems. Tomorrow will be an interesting day for Richard’s empire as well, as he takes the insights from his Power Pivot-driven dashboards and restructures his business accordingly. Richard could also see that profitability across certain key stores was particularly strong, but that they were subsidizing other retail platforms that were unprofitable and had no strategic purpose, other than cannibalizing sales from profitable stores. Which drove margins down further (a very bad thing). From his dashboards, he could see that sales were up (a good thing), but the product mix was skewing away from his higher margin products (a bad thing), and were entirely purchased using discount codes and other similar “special” prices, Yesterday was an interesting day for Richard’s retail empire. This is the first article in a series relating to Microsoft’s Power BI suite of programs (not to be mistaken for Power BI, the software, but definitely related).

Power pivot office 2013