Steelworks finance command center: a Power BI redesign

A steel fabrication company (piping and structural work) runs its finance from ERP ledgers: customer, vendor and general ledger entries. The owner had a 7-page Power BI report. Each page answered one question, so to know "are we on budget, and is cash coming in?" the owner had to open three pages and read tables of raw numbers.

A year switcher (2022, 2023, 2024) replaces the date picker, so every number is for one clear period.

Four KPI tiles: sales with change vs last year, the budget gap in dollars and percent, receivables with days sales outstanding (DSO), payables.

Sales vs budget by month: bars with a budget tick. Months below budget turn orange, so the misses stand out without reading a number.

Three years against budget stays in view whatever year is selected: 89%, 114% and 74% of budget.

Top customers as bars show the risk the old table hid: one customer was about 60% of 2024 sales.

Receivables and DSO on one chart, so higher open balances and slower payment show up together.

A collections list: who to call first, each open balance split by how old it is.

Open balances by age, and receivables against payables at every month end.

The new report connects live to the existing semantic model and reuses its measures, so every figure matches the original report. No data was copied and the original report was not changed. For this portfolio the figures are scaled and customer names are replaced with fictional ones.

Two-page Power BI report in the PBIR format: custom theme, eight KPI tiles and eight charts custom-built with Deneb (Vega-Lite), year switchers kept in step across both pages, and a live connection to the existing model. A model review came with it: month-end ageing, payables by supplier, a calculation group in place of about 100 copied time measures.