Purchase spend analysis content pack for Power BI

Overview

The Purchase spend analysis content pack for Microsoft Power BI was created for purchasing managers and managers who are responsible for budgets. It’s designed to help them keep an eye on purchase spending. It uses purchase transactional data from Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Operations, and provides both an aggregate view of the company-wide purchase figures and a breakdown of purchase spending by vendor and product.

Reports highlight changes in purchase spending over time. Therefore, they can be used to alert managers about positive and negative spending trends for individual vendors and products. Charts show purchase spending for different procurement categories and vendor groups. Category and regional managers might find it useful to use these charts to help identify changes in spending behavior.

The content pack lets purchase managers and managers who are responsible for budgets analyze purchase spending in the following ways:

• Year-to-date purchase (by vendor group and individual vendors, procurement category and individual products, and vendor location)
• Year-over-year purchase change (by vendor group and procurement category)

Accessing the content pack

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

Metrics that are included in the content pack

The Purchase spend analysis content pack 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 pack.

Report page	Charts	Tiles
Purchase by vendor	Top 10 vendors by purchase (stacked bar chart) Total purchase by vendor group / country / name (pie chart) Purchase by vendor group / country / name (column chart) Average purchase by vendor group / country / name (column chart)	Total purchase YOY purchase growth Total # vendors Total # of active vendors
Purchase by product	Purchase by procurement category / product name (column chart) Total purchase by procurement category / product name (pie chart) Top 10 products by purchase (stacked bar chart)	Total # of products Total active products percentage of total # of products Number of products accounting for 80% purchase
Purchase by period*	Purchase by month / day (column chart) Cumulative purchase YOY variance (waterfall chart) Total purchase YOY growth (column chart) Procurement statement (matrix)	YOY purchase growth YOY purchase growth %
Purchase by vendor location	Purchase by city Purchase YOY growth % Purchase by country
Purchase spend analysis by time	Purchase current year by month / day (line chart) Purchase current and last year (line and column chart)
Purchase spend analysis by vendor	Top 10 vendor purchase % of purchase (funnel) Top 10 vendors with increased spending YOY Top 10 vendors with decreased spending YOY

* Purchase this year and last year, and growth by procurement category

Data model and entities

Dynamics 365 for Operations data is used for the report in the Purchase spend analysis content pack. This data is represented as aggregate measurements that are staged in the Entity store, which is a Microsoft SQL database that is optimized for analytics. For more information about the Entity store, see the Power BI integration with Entity Store in Dynamics blog post. The aggregate measurements in this content pack are the subset of aggregate measurements that were available in the Purchase 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 are available directly from the Invoice lines entity and are used as the basis of the content pack.

Entity	Key aggregate measurements	Data source for Dynamics 365 for Operations	Field	Description
Invoice lines	Purchase	VendInvoiceTrans	SUM(LineAmountMST)	The amount in the accounting currency

The following table shows the key measurements that are calculated in the content pack from the Invoice lines entity.

Measure	Calculation
Purchase current year	Purchase current year = SUM(‘Invoice lines'[Purchase])
Purchase last year	Purchase last year = CALCULATE(SUM(‘Invoice lines'[Purchase]), SAMEPERIODLASTYEAR(Dates[Date]))
YOY purchase growth	YOY purchase growth = [Purchase current year] – [Purchase last year]

The following key dimensions in the content pack are used as filters to slice the aggregate measurements, so that you can achieve more granularity and deeper analytical insights.

Entity	Examples of attributes
Vendors	Vendor groups, Vendor country or regions, Vendor name
Products	Product number, Product name, Item groups name
Procurement categories	Procurement category, Procurement category names
Legal entities	Legal entity name
Dates	Dates, Year offset

By default, the content pack 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.

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