Sales and profitability performance content pack for Power BI

Overview

This content pack was created for sales managers to monitor the key sales metrics of revenue, gross profit, and profit margins. It uses sales transactional data from Dynamics 365 for Operations, and provides both an aggregate view of the company-wide sales figures and a breakdown of sales performance for customers and products.

By highlighting changes in the revenue and profit growth over time, reports can be used to alert managers about positive and negative trends for individual customers and products. Category and regional managers will find it useful to have charts that compare revenue and profitability of different product categories and customer groups to each other to single out laggards and leaders. A comprehensive report that plots individual customer’s revenue versus profit margin offers account managers a data-backed foundation to attune their sales and marketing efforts to each customer’s respective profile.

The Sales and profitability performance content pack enables Sales managers to analyze sales performance by:

• 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 by:

• 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 content pack

The Sales and profitability performance Power BI content pack is published as an implementation asset in Lifecycle Services (LCS) and can be accessed from Dynamics 365 for Operations. For more information about how to access and launch Power BI reports, see the blog Authoring and distributing Power BI reports with Dynamics.

Metrics included in the content pack

The content pack includes a report that consists of a set of metrics visualized as charts, tiles, and tables.

The following table provides an overview of the visualisations in the content pack.

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

Dynamics 365 for Operations data is used to populate the report in the Sales and profitability performance content pack. This is represented as aggregate measurements that are staged in the Entity store, which is a Microsoft SQL database optimized for analytics. Read more about it in the blog Power BI integration with Entity Store in Dynamics. The aggregate measurements in this content pack are the subset of the aggregate measurements that were available in the Sales Cube in Dynamics AX 2012 and 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 on how to stage aggregate measurements into the Entity store in the blog Power BI integration with Entity Store in Dynamics.

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

Entity	Key aggregate measurements	Data source for Dynamics 365 for Operations	Field	Description
Invoice lines	Revenue	CustInvoiceTrans	SUM(LineAmountMST)	Amount in accounting currency
	Cost of goods sold	InventTrans	SUM(CostAmountPosted + CostAmountAdjustment)	Cost amount + adjustment
	Commission line amount – accounting currency	CustInvoiceTrans	SUM(CommissAmountMST)	Commission amount in 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 pack’s dataset.

Measure	Calculated as
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 to achieve greater granularity and 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 pack displays data for the current calendar year, but you can open the report filters section and change the date filter. You can also change the company filter.

Additional resources

Here are some helpful links that are related to entities and building Power BI content:

• Data entities
• Creating organizational content packs
• Data modeling using Power BI
• Adding Power BI tiles to workspaces