FreshBI has turned the PowerBI Performance Financials process into something we’re proud of, given the limitations in paginated reporting in Power BI. What used to be out of reach for every accountant is now a reality; custom paginated reports in PowerBI are functional, conceptually easy and fast (depending how deep you venture down the DAX hole)

In a nut-shell, we design a structure that a ‘Display Measure’ can use to decide which formula to should be displayed in the values section of the matrix. Our design structure is a static table ( Excel / ‘In-Memory’ / SQL server ) with at least 3 columns: Index, Grouping, and Formatted Header. Index maintains the order of the structure, Grouping is consumed by the Dax to gather the correct account(s) (Take note that this does NOT have to be one data type. Some Lines could be single accounts, some lines could be whole departments. We’ll get to this later.) and Formatted Header is what we actually see when we’re viewing the report.

Our Dax Formulas start with the ‘Display measure’ which ‘switches’ the output formula. In the ‘Display measure’, we check which formula we should be using and retrieves it to the matrix. Inside a ‘Display measure’, we would probably have 3 ‘Base measures’: Single Account, Low Level Grouping and High-Level Groupings. The Dax is complex, but I’ll do my best to explain and provide examples.