Document automation via Power BI

[mai_academ]

Hello everyone,

I'm looking for advice for find a right tool and\or approach to my problem.

In our daily routine we need to create customized invoices for our clients (and a bunch of other accounting documentation). Our business management system isn't well suited for this, so I wonder if I can give access to company employees to generate these docs with the help of Power BI? I've already implemented data visualisation through Power BI, and I was hoping data model based on management system MySQL that I've created can also help me tackle this problem.

Majority of accounting documentation are basically tables with very few paragraphs of text. I can easily create custom reports with correct data and text and export them to Excel.

So my question is... is Power BI the right tool for that? Are there any custom visuals\plugins for Power BI that might help (that's why it's in "custom visuals" section)? I googled it but didn't find anything specific, except for one vendor who offers these kind of documentation automation services for a price.

//Generally speaking I'd prefer to get rid of these problems at the root cause... but it's what it is, I guess.

[ErikHamoen · Accepted solution]

Hi Mai,

It sounds like a perfect opportunity to use Paginated Reports for this, have you thought about that?
In this video, Patrick from Guy in a Cube explains why it's so powerful:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSIbRNXGgPQ 

You can for example create different templates for different (group of) customers, select the right customer and show the detailed info on the correct place 🙂 Good luck! 

[mai_academ]

Thank you, Erik, yes, I've already figured out that there's such a thing as paginated reports. I'm already on to it 😉