Drop in your accounting export and click Refresh. Your P&L against budget, ready to send. Budget vs Actual is a management-accounts dashboard for Power BI. Paste a flat export from your accounting software into one Excel workbook, click Refresh, and you get a proper P&L against budget: every line, every subtotal, the variance in dollars and percent, and last year alongside. The fiddly part of a P&L in Power BI is the layout: the row order, the headers and the subtotal lines that don't exist in your data. That is already solved here with a simple layout table you edit in Excel, so you can match your own chart of accounts in minutes Prefer the ready-made template? Get Budget vs Actual for $19, with the dashboard, the Excel file and a step-by-step guide: https://pivotalstats.gumroad.com/l/budget-vs-actual-power-bi Watch the full build on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PivotalstatsProjects https://youtu.be/ZR7QeSCZh6gWhat you need Power BI Desktop from Microsoft (Windows), 2025 or newer Microsoft Excel The sample data file Budget vs Actual.xlsx: {sample_data_url} What you'll build A budget versus actual dashboard for a small business, built in Power BI from one Excel workbook: a real P&L with subtotals, variances coloured by whether they help or hurt profit, a budget-to-actual profit bridge and a cost page that points at the overspend. It uses Power Query, a small star schema, DAX user-defined functions and only Microsoft's standard visuals. Step 01: A tour of the dashboard The Overview page has five variance tiles (revenue, gross profit, gross margin, operating expenses and net profit), net profit by month against budget and last year, and a budget-to-actual bridge. The P&L statement page is a native matrix laid out like management accounts. The Cost detail page ranks cost overruns and shows them by department and month. Two slicers in the header control everything: Period (year to date or month) and As of (the month you report on). Step 02: One Excel workbook The workbook has four Excel tables. Transactions is a flat ledger export: Date, Reference, Description, Account Code, Account Name, Department and Amount, one row per line. Credit notes and refunds are negative amounts. Budget holds Month, Account Code, Department and Amount. Account Map assigns every account code to a Report Line and Section, with a Sign of 1 for income and -1 for costs. Report Lines is the layout of the P&L: Sort Order, Row Type (Header, Account or Subtotal), Section and Indent. Because the layout lives in Excel, you can rename or reorder lines without editing DAX.
