Your board wants dashboards. IT recommends Power BI. And you’re sitting there with your P&L in Excel, because that’s where you get it done fastest. Sound familiar? Then this blog is for you. The choice between Power BI and Excel isn’t as black and white as it seems. In this blog, Thomas Werkhoven, Director of Exsion365 and former controller at Van Wijnen and BAM, makes an honest comparison. Not to score points, but to help you choose.

The question every controller asks themselves

Power BI is everywhere. It’s in every proposal, on every shortlist and in every IT presentation. And rightly so: for enterprise-wide analyses, predictive models and strategic dashboards, it’s a strong platform.

But as a controller, you ask yourself a different question. You want to know: can I run my P&L tomorrow? Can I update my cashflow without calling IT? Can I finish a reconciliation before the auditor arrives?

Those aren’t BI questions. Those are reporting questions. And the difference is bigger than you’d think.

Where Power BI excels

Power BI is built for analyses across large datasets. Think trend analyses spanning multiple years, dashboards that serve several departments, and visual overviews for the board and management.

If your organisation needs fixed dashboards managed by IT, where a hundred employees log in at the same time, Power BI is the logical choice. The platform does that well.

But that strength comes with a caveat: implementation takes months, costs tens of thousands of euros and makes you dependent on consultants for every adjustment. Want to add a column? That’ll be a change request.

Where Excel (with Exsion) wins

For a controller’s daily work, things look different. P&L reporting, cashflow overviews, bank reconciliations, general ledger checks: that’s work you want to do quickly, flexibly and independently. In an environment you know.

Exsion Reporting connects Excel directly to Business Central. You build your report once, refresh it with one click and instantly have up-to-date figures. No export, no copy-pasting, no IT ticket.

At 4PS, they use exactly this combination. Arnold van der Werf, License Specialist at 4PS, describes it as follows: Power BI for the fixed dashboards, Exsion for everything where the controller needs to act quickly and independently.

The comparison per report type

This is how we see it. Not a marketing pitch, but an honest breakdown based on what we encounter in practice.

What this means in practice

Most controllers I speak with already have Power BI in their organisation. That doesn’t need to change. Exsion doesn’t replace Power BI. It complements it.

Where Power BI delivers the strategic layer, Exsion handles the operational work. Your monthly reporting, your cashflow, your reconciliation. The work you do every day, where speed and flexibility matter.

A client in the construction sector put it well: they use Power BI for board reporting, and Exsion for daily operational reports. What used to take three days now takes minutes.

The 80/20 rule of thumb

For roughly 80% of your daily reporting needs, you don’t need an enterprise BI platform. You need a reliable connection between your data and your Excel. Exsion delivers exactly that.

The remaining 20%, where you need enterprise-wide KPIs, forecasting models and visual dashboards, that’s where Power BI is the right choice.

That’s not a compromise. That’s the right tool for the right job.

Where to start

Look at your own reporting process. How much time do you spend per month on P&L reporting, cashflow and reconciliations? And how much of that could you refresh with one click if you connected Excel directly to Business Central?

At Exsion365, we build the first report together with you. Within five minutes the plugin is installed. Within an hour you have your first working report. Without IT, without an implementation project.

Curious what that looks like for your situation? Get in touch for a no-obligation demo.