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BI Book Planning and Power BI enable controllers, IT leaders and executives to lead with data

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Let’s be honest: in the public sector, “financial planning” is often just a polite term for “Excel-induced chaos” and spreadsheet mess. Between fluctuating student volumes, changing funding models, and the constant demand for transparency and predictable financial planning, many controllers spend more time wrestling with dozens of Excel sheets than actually guiding strategy. This spreadsheet chaos leads to disorganized data, making it difficult for the business to focus on strategic financial planning, manage spending, and achieve complete visibility into resources and revenue.

Lounais-Häme Education Consortium (LHKK) decided they’d had enough of the Excel mess and confusion. By moving their budgeting and forecasting into BI Book Planning, they transformed their Power BI environment from a simple rearview mirror into an easy-to-use navigation system, creating a single source of truth for the entire organization.

The Challenge: 22 Teams, 22 Excels, and a lot of manual work

Before the transition, LHKK faced a classic public-sector bottleneck. Budgeting was a fragmented manual process involving over 20 operational teams.

“With 22 teams, everything was collected in Excel and entered manually. It was slow, and large amount of manual work increased the possibility of errors,” says Mika Karppinen, Controller at LHKK.

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As a result, this meant a nightmare of version control. Manual processes in Excel are labor-intensive and difficult to manage across the entire business. Many organizations still rely on offline Excel spreadsheets for budgeting and forecasting activities. The end result was scattered information, a cumbersome budgeting process, and haphazard forecasting. There was no common planning environment, leading to data silos. For the Executive team, it meant that by the time they saw the data, it was already “historical fiction” rather than a real-time forecast.

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The Solution: Why BI Book Planning?

Public organizations are often “system-rich but insight-poor.” LHKK already had Power BI, so adding an other standalone, complex planning software felt like buying a second kitchen just to toast bread.

BI Book Planning was the logical choice for three strategic reasons:

1. Zero “New System” Friction: It lives inside Power BI. If your team can use a browser, they can use BI Book Planning.
2. Architecture Sanity: BI Book reuses existing data models, keeping the IT landscape lean and the IT managers happy.
3. Auditability by Design: In the public sector, “we think the numbers are right” doesn’t fly with auditors. BI Book provides a digital paper trail, including audit trails, that Excel simply can’t match. The lack of workflows, audit trails, and data validation measures complicates budgeting and forecasting processes, but BI Book addresses these challenges with robust tools and practices.

“BI Book Planning is simple to use, it doesn’t require any special training, and everyone got started using it right away. In addition, BI Book consultant was really knowledgeable and helped quickly whenever needed.” – Mika

The Result: Connecting Student Success to the Bottom Line

In education, finance isn’t just about Euros; it’s about student outcomes. The solution implemented by LHKK integrates operational metrics directly into the financial model, allowing for a sense of how business operations and spending contribute to overall performance:

• New student intakes and credit accumulation.
• Study progress and qualification rates.
• The “So What?” Factor: Controllers can now see exactly how a dip in student credits will impact funding three months down the line.

Now teams can directly see how student progress impacts funding and can plan their activities more effectively based on this information, in near real-time. Drill-down capabilities in Power BI reports allow users to see metrics at the department level, providing department heads with detailed insights and supporting collaborative discussions around budgeting and forecasting. This level of access to report details enables the entire organization to focus on strategies that achieve better outcomes.

Concrete benefits for public sector: less manual work, more understanding and predictability

BI Book Planning brings several clear benefits to the public sector organisations like educational institutions:

• Elimination of Excel and budgeting in one clear system — no more spreadsheet chaos or data silos

• Automatically updated financial and student data from multiple sources

• Transparency for teams: where funding comes from and where expenses are incurred

• Possibility of regular forecasting and scenarios that were not previously available

• Reduced risk of errors and improved audit trails

•  Clearly accelerated planning process with automated roll-ups and formulas

• Easier and more visual reporting thanks to the combination of Power BI and BI Book, enabling users to create visualizations that provide an at-a-glance picture of budgeting and forecasting performance

• Collaboration: Power BI and BI Book Planning allows for collaborative budgeting and forecasting by enabling multiple users to input data and comments, add notes, and facilitate communication for better decision-making

• Write-back features allow users to enter, update, or edit data directly within the visualizations

• Automate reporting workflows, making it easier to distribute reports and manage processes

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BI Book benefits for controllers, IT and executive management

Here is how this shift impacts the key players in any public organization:

For controllers and finance teams

• Excel removed from core budgeting processes, making it easier to manage budgeting and forecasting
• Centralised, consistent planning data and a single source of truth
• Faster forecasting and scenario analysis, leveraging Power BI's ability to automate roll-ups and calculations
• Lower error risk and improved auditability with robust audit trails and data validation

For IT managers and CIOs

• Builds on existing Power BI architecture and robust BI Book solution
• No parallel planning systems, reducing  data silos
• Scalable and easy to develop further, with a flexible data model and integration with other tools
• Lower maintenance and governance overhead

For executives and leadership

• Real-time visibility into financial position and performance, including actual versus budget analysis
• Clear link between activity, volumes, and funding, with the ability to drill down into department-level details
• Better decision-making with reliable forecasts and access to comprehensive reports
• Improved transparency towards stakeholders and the entire organization

“Financial planning is now a central, up-to-date, and reliable whole in a familiar Power BI environment,” Karppinen notes.“It supports both daily management and long-term development, helping us achieve our business goals.”

Looking Ahead: AI, cost accounting and utilization of student data

LHKK isn’t stopping at better budgeting. The following developments are also built around future changes in funding and strengthening transparency:

• Making the connection between student numbers and funding even clearer for teams •Developing activity-based accounting and increasing transparency of the cost structure

• Possible connection of HR data and the new HR system, integrating information into a centralized database

• Opportunities brought by artificial intelligence, for example, quickly retrieving internal information within the organization via an AI tool, and staying ahead of trends in data visualization and forecasting

The roadmap includes AI-driven decision support. Imagine asking an AI assistant, “How does a 5% increase in nursing students affect our facility costs?” and getting an answer in seconds.

That’s not science fiction; it’s the power of BI Book AI to deliver real insights and help companies make sense of complex data.

BI Book Planning: Smarter Planning, Better Results.

If your organization is still running its multi-million Euro budget on dozens of Excel spreadsheets, it’s time to evolve. You don’t need a massive IT overhaul to get real results — you just need to make your Power BI work smarter. With BI Book, you will get better results, maximize your investment, and empower your teams to focus on what matters most. Easily and cost-effectively.

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Start making your data more useful. Contact us now.

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