Power BI/ RE integration- Adding and comparing forecast income figures

Rob Johnstone

Hi, the charity I work for is relatively new to RE/ Power BI integration, we have a feed from RE and we have used it to manipulate data from our existing source and create fund/ appeal etc analysis using Power BI's wide range of graphical tools. The next stage is that we would like to use Power BI to do some serious budgeting and compare actual fundraising income figures with forecast budgeted monthly figures. As RE doesn't allow the user to input target figures, i'm looking at ways of getting them into Power BI and, as I'm quite new to that, I'm not sure how i could do that. I'm presuming it is doable as it is a case of comparing figures from 2 data sources but i'm not sure how it is done. If anyone has any advice on ways to compare actual with target data then that would be very helpful.

Alex Wong

@Rob Johnstone
it depends on how you have your data and what data are you forecasting.

If you are talking about fundraising gift goal, Campaign, Fund, Appeal, and Package all have goal that can be set.

If you are talking about forecasting budget (expense) month over month, you can use budget module in FE (assuming you use FE NXT too) and expense recording.

If none of the above data location is a right “fit” then you can always use an external location for this data (such as an excel/sharepoint list in a cloud sharepoint location), as that can be read into Power BI too, you just have to make sure there are “unique identifier” from goal to actual's coding.

Rob Johnstone

@Alex Wong Thank you Alex, that is very helpful.

To answer your question, it is campaign and gift goals, but we would like to break them down by monthly targets (rather than just one goal for the campaign)

Alex Wong

@Rob Johnstone
while not knowing how your campaign and fund setup is, you “CAN” use campaign attribute (for example Jan Goal, Feb Goal, etc).

However, given that it is more “difficult” to get campaign attribute (you can only get 1 campaign at a time per API call), I think it would be better that you setup an excel file that has the month to month breakdown of goal

Rob Johnstone

@Alex Wong Thanks Alex, that is very helpful. I think a separate excel file is the route we will take, I just wanted to scope out whether there are any other options people are using first.