Unlocking Insights: How Power BI Revolutionized Our Payroll Reporting

WHAT IS POWER BI?

Power BI, a business analytics service by Microsoft, is a powerful tool that transforms complex data into easy-to-understand reports. It is a user-friendly interface and drag-and-drop functionality makes it accessible for users at any skill level, enabling the creation of stunning visualizations without extensive training.

From the Visualizations pane, you can choose how your report will be displayed—whether as a table, matrix, or pie chart. Power BI seamlessly integrates the selected data into your chosen visual format.

The Payroll Connector is a game-changer for integrating payroll systems (like PaySpace) with Power BI. This pre-built tool pulls payroll data directly from PaySpace into Power BI without any messy manual exports or complex data transformations. It covers all the key metrics: gross pay, deductions, taxes, benefits, and net pay—everything you need for reporting and analysis at your fingertips.

GETTING STARTED: FROM SIMPLE TO COMPLEX REPORTS

Figure 1: Your first look when opening Power BI.

Next, select how you want to display your data. Let’s say you start with a simple table that shows some biographical data.

Figure 2: Building a flat table report.

Feel like switching it up? With just a click, you can transform your table into a pie chart, a stack chart, or whatever fits your style!

MAKE IT PRETTY: UNLEASHING CREATIVITY

Power BI is more than just data. It’s your canvas! You can go wild with aesthetics, design awesome dashboards, and create professional-looking reports that dazzle.

If you’re feeling fancy, dive into DAX coding and craft dynamic measures to automate all those manual calculations you used to wrestle with. And Power BI supports almost any file format—Excel, CSV, PDF, JSON—you name it!

OUR POWER BI JOURNEY SO FAR

Since starting this journey in November 2023, Axiomatic has built some seriously cool reports for both our internal and external clients. One standout? A costing report that used to take hours of manual labour—administrators had to extract data from 4 separate reports just to meet the client’s needs! Now, with Power BI, we’ve cut it down to a single report that takes only about 15 minutes to generate. This represents a saving of over 40 hours per month, every month for our payroll team—and we’re just getting started!

One of our proudest accomplishments has been creating consolidated reports for multiple companies. Where payroll systems could only generate one report per company before, Power BI now lets us pull data for over 42 companies with the push of a button!

We’re also diving deep into the fun side of Power BI—exploring its visual tools, cool shortcuts, and everything in between. Our team is on a mission to find smarter, faster ways to eliminate the tedious work of generating monthly payroll reports.

Discover how our team can help you streamline your payroll reporting and unlock valuable insights. Get in touch with us today to learn more about our Power BI services.

Stay tuned for more exciting updates in our next issue. Until then, happy reporting!

The Axiomatic Team

If you found this article insightful, you won’t want to miss our previous piece on Automation in Payroll. It delves into practical examples of how automation can streamline payroll processes, reduce errors, and boost efficiency.

Check it out here: Automation in Payroll: A Practical Case Study Example.

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