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Regional sales dashboard

A Power BI report replacing a 40-tab spreadsheet that took two days a month to assemble by hand.

1 min read

The problem

Monthly regional reporting was a spreadsheet: one tab per region, assembled by hand from four exports, reconciled by eye. Two days of someone's month, and by the time it was finished it was three weeks out of date.

What I built

A star-schema model over the same four sources, refreshed nightly, with the report built on top.

LayerTool
SourcesERP export, CRM API, two CSVs
TransformPower Query
ModelStar schema, 1 fact + 5 dimensions
ReportPower BI, 4 pages

Decisions worth recording

  • One fact table at order-line grain. Everything else aggregates up from there. Resisting a second fact table kept the filter behaviour predictable.
  • A proper date dimension, marked as a date table, so time intelligence works without special cases.
  • Measures, not calculated columns, wherever the result depends on filter context.

The result

Two days of manual assembly became a nightly refresh. The reconciliation step disappeared, because there was no longer anything to reconcile.