Developing Forecast Model using What If Parameters

[kgwin97]

My supervisor has me working on building a forecast model in Power BI that accepts input from the report user and reflects that in the forecast accordingly.  I work for an insurance company, so what we are projecting is membership growth and the inputs they want to manipulate are growth precentages based upon certain product or sales strategies they can employ.  What I have done so far is build a report that pulls in prior and current year member counts.  Then I use use the actuals as a base for proejcting future months based upon user input percentages as What If Parameters for the remainder of the current year plus two future years.

The way I have it built now is they input a number of percentages that are then applied uniformly to all years in the forecast. This is not ideal as you can't expect each year to have the same growth, also you gain more/less membership at certain times of the year and they want be able to work that in as well. So they want to be able to apply growth percentages to certain months in a year. In my mind to gain the level of control they are looking for I am going to have to create a separate What If Parameter for each month that could potentially be forecast for and then pull them all into measures accordingly.

I have a little less than a year of experience in Power BI, but I feel like I am at the point where I can find a way to accomplish about anything I set out to do, but not always in the best or most efficient way. So before I spend hours making like 36 What If Parameters and building measures to aggregate them all, I thought I would ask some questions.

1. Am I going about this the best way?  They definitely want to allow the report user to manipulate the forecast, which is how I ended up with What If Parameters.  But is a separate parameter for each month really necessary?
2. Is a report with 36 (potentially) What If Parameters going to be slow for the user to work with? Right now I only have like 6 of them and I feel like the slicer boxes for the parameters take an extra 5 - 10 seconds to load past the rest of the report.
3. Am I just using the wrong tool here? Is Power BI just not really made for something like this?

I appreciate any constructive feedback.

Thanks!

[VijayP]

@kgwin97 

having 36 what if parameters is not really effective and it cause report latency which is not right for  end user.

I think you can achieve this using power apps where you can give some input fields in the Power Apps and then create a sharepoint list and that will be integrated with PowerBI and that works as a whatif !!