Sales and profitability performance Power BI content

This article describes what is included in the Sales and profitability performance Microsoft Power BI content. It explains how to access the Power BI reports, and provides information about the data model and entities that are used to build the content.

Overview

The Sales and profitability performance Power BI content was created so that sales managers can monitor the key sales metrics of revenue, gross profit, and profit margins. It uses sales transactional data, and provides both an aggregate view of the company-wide sales figures and a breakdown of sales performance for customers and products.

Reports highlight changes in revenue and profit growth over time. Therefore, the reports can be used to alert managers about positive and negative trends for individual customers and products. Additionally, charts compare the revenue and profitability of different product categories and customer groups to each other. Therefore, category and regional managers can identify laggards and leaders. Finally, a comprehensive report plots an individual customer's revenue versus profit margin. Therefore, account managers have a data-backed foundation that they can use to tune their sales and marketing efforts to each customer's profile.

The Sales and profitability performance content lets sales managers analyze sales performance in the following ways:

  • Revenue, year-to-date (by customer group and individual customers, sales categories, and individual products and geographies)
  • Revenue change, year-over-year (by customer regions and sales categories)

Profitability can be analyzed in these ways:

  • Gross profit and profit margin (by customer groups and product sales categories)
  • Gross profit change, year-over-year
  • Customer profitability (by revenue versus gross margin)

Accessing the Power BI content

The Sales and profitability performance Power BI content is shown on the Sales and profitability performance page (Sales and marketing > Inquiries and reports > Sales performance analysis > Sales and profitability performance).

Metrics that are included in the Power BI content

The Sales and profitability performance Power BI content includes a report that consists of a set of metrics. These metrics are visualized as charts, tiles, and tables. The following table provides an overview of the visualizations in the content.

Report page Charts Tiles
Revenue by customer Top 10 customers by revenue Total revenue
Total revenue by customer group YOY revenue growth
Average customer revenue by customer group Gross margin
Revenue & gross profit by customer group
Revenue by product Revenue & gross profit by sales category Total # of products
Top 10 products by revenue Total number of active products and percentage of total
Total revenue by sales category Number of products accounting for 80% revenue
Revenue by period* Revenue by month YOY revenue growth
Trailing revenue variance, YOY YOY revenue growth %
Total sales variance by customer region
Revenue by location Sales revenue by city
YOY revenue growth %
Sales revenue by region
Customer profitability Gross margin versus revenue, by customer Gross profit, gross margin, YOY revenue growth
Profitability analysis Revenue and gross profit by month
Top 15 customers by gross margin
Gross profit by month, YOY

* Revenue this and last year, and growth by sales category.

Understanding the data model and entities

The following data is used to fill the report in the Sales and profitability performance Power BI content. This data is represented as aggregate measurements that are staged in the Entity store. The Entity store is a Microsoft SQL Server database that is optimized for analytics. For more information, see Power BI integration with Entity store.

The aggregate measurements in this content are the subset of aggregate measurements that were available in the sales cube in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 and Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3. To stage the cube's aggregate measurements in the Entity store, you must make them deployable. For more information, see the procedure for staging aggregate measurements in the Entity store in the Power BI integration with Entity Store in Dynamics blog post.

The following key aggregate measurements of the Invoice lines entity are used as the basis of the content.

Entity Key aggregate measurements Data source for Dynamics 365 Field Description
Invoice lines Revenue CustInvoiceTrans SUM(LineAmountMST) The amount in the accounting currency.
Cost of goods sold InventTrans SUM(CostAmountPosted + CostAmountAdjustment) The sum of the cost amount and the adjustment.
Commission line amount – accounting currency CustInvoiceTrans SUM(CommissAmountMST) The commission amount in the accounting currency.

The following table shows the key aggregate measurements of the Invoice lines entity that are used to create several calculated measures in the content's dataset.

Measure Calculation
Gross profit SUM(Revenue – COGS – Commission – Sales tax (included in customer invoice line amount))
Gross margin SUM(Gross profit / (Revenue - Sales tax (included in customer invoice line amount)))
Revenue last year Revenue last year = CALCULATE(SUM('Invoice lines'[Revenue]), SAMEPERIODLASTYEAR(Dates[Date])

The following key dimensions in the sales cube are used as filters to slice the aggregate measurements, so that you can achieve greater granularity and gain deeper analytical insights.

Entity Examples of attributes
Customers Customer groups, Customer regions, Address, Industry
Products Product number, Product name, Item groups name
Sales categories Sales category names
Legal entities Legal entity names
Dates Dates

By default, the content shows data for the current calendar year. However, you can change the date filter in the report filters section. You can also change the company filter.