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.