Most management reports in South African businesses still start life in Excel. That’s not a bad thing: Excel is flexible, everyone knows it, and for many tasks it’s the right tool. But there is a point where the monthly reporting pack takes days to build, nobody is sure which version is right, and decisions are made on last month’s numbers. That’s usually the point to look at Power BI.
Signs you’ve outgrown Excel for reporting
- Someone spends days each month copying data from several systems into one workbook.
- There are several versions of “the report”, and meetings start with arguments about whose numbers are right.
- Workbooks are slow, fragile or too big to email, and break when one person changes a formula.
- Managers want to drill into the detail, but the report is a static PDF.
- You need different people to see different data, for example each regional manager seeing only their region.
- Decisions wait for month-end because nobody can see the current position.
What Power BI does differently
- One trusted data model. Power BI connects directly to your systems (accounting, CRM, databases, SharePoint lists, even Excel files) and combines them in one model, so everyone works from the same numbers.
- Scheduled refresh. Reports update automatically, daily or several times a day, instead of being rebuilt by hand.
- Interactive dashboards. Users filter, drill down and explore without breaking anything.
- Security built in. Row-level security means each person only sees the data they’re allowed to see, from the same report.
- Anywhere access. Reports work in the browser, in Microsoft Teams and in the Power BI mobile app.
What Excel still does best
Power BI doesn’t replace Excel. Excel remains the better tool for ad hoc analysis, budgeting and forecasting models, one-off calculations and anything where people need to type numbers in. The two also work together: Power BI can use Excel files as a data source, and people with access can analyse a Power BI dataset in Excel with a pivot table. A good rule of thumb is: Excel for working things out, Power BI for sharing the answer.
What Power BI costs
Power BI Desktop, the tool for building reports, is free. Sharing reports is licensed per user or per capacity:
| Option | List price (US$) | Typically suits |
|---|---|---|
| Power BI Pro | $14 per user per month | Teams where most people who view reports also have a licence |
| Premium Per User | $24 per user per month | Smaller teams that need larger datasets or advanced features |
| Fabric capacity (F64 and up) | Priced per capacity | Large audiences, where people with free licences can view shared reports |
Power BI Pro is also included in Microsoft 365 E5. Prices are Microsoft’s US dollar list prices at the time of writing. Local pricing through your Microsoft reseller will be in rand and may differ.
How to make the switch without a big-bang project
- Pick one painful report. Choose the monthly pack that takes the most effort, not the whole organisation’s reporting.
- Fix the data at the source. Connect Power BI to the source systems rather than to the copied-and-pasted workbook, so the time saving is real.
- Agree the definitions. Decide once what “revenue”, “active customer” or “overdue” means, and build it into the model.
- Keep Excel where it works. Let finance keep its budget model, and feed actuals to it from Power BI.
- Train the people who use it. An hour showing managers how to filter and drill down pays for itself quickly.
We build Power BI dashboards and reports that connect to the systems South African businesses already run, from simple daily reports to live, multi-source dashboards. Learn more about our Power BI work or tell us which report is costing you the most time.