How does it work? The workbook uses a combination of Excel tables to extend budgets using a calendar and the summarises them by account and month. You can see the tables by using the Excel Menu Formulas->Name Manager. You can see the Power Queries by using the Menu Data-> Queries and Connections. The Account tables have the expenditure Accounts from Xero; these should be checked against your Xero company before you start entering you own budgets. Also note that this data does not have to reside in the workbook, you could read them from an external data source, although care must be taken if an account name is added or changes.

The Budget master is where you enter your actual budget the frequencies that are available are weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual (W,M,Q,A). The Account names use a lookup to the Account Table and the dates are validated to be withing the data parameter table. The code has been tested for a July-June financial year. Againe this table could be external, for instance in a SharePoint list. If you wanted to create a shared budget process you can use Power Query to hook up your data sources. Note there is no fortnightly frequency, this was omitted in favour the only having a weekly frequency, but you could do a fortnightly frequency if you needed to.

The Calendar Master is a table that is not visible on the workbook sheets, but it is present in the Power Query side of the calculations. The Calendar is used to generate separate intermediate queries for each frequency. These intermediate tables are then combined and appear on the Budget sheet and its associated table. As you work on the BudgetMaster sheet, adding budgets, you can also review using the Summary by Account sheet, which has a pivot table. You will need to ‘Refresh All’ on the data tab to see the changes updated. There’s also a summary page with a budget pivot and a graph, have a play here to view your developing budget. When you have finished updating your budget you Xero budget is available on the XeroExpenditureBudget sheet. Now you are ready to transfer your budget to Xero. Grab your budget template from Xero in Accounting->Reports->Financial Performance->Budget Manager, make sure you select for the financial year then Export->Excel. Open the downloaded workbook, click on enable editing. Then cut the value from the XeroBudgetMaker->XeroExpeditureBudget pivot table and ‘Paste Values’ into the correct position on the template. Then import the template back into Xero.

My suggestion is that as you develop a budget, that you create a fresh budget in Xero and then think about overwriting the default budget when you are ready. Download the workbook XeroBudgetMaker Watch the YouTube video

This post relates to this YouTube video
This is a ChatGPT summary of the video, with some editing to add context :-)

Requirements

• A Xero account and a Odatalink account to connect to it.
• Power BI Report Builder installed.
• Xero4PowerBI deployed to your Power BI service.

Setup

1. Download the Zip file from the Xero4PowerBIReporting.
2. Extract the Journal.rdl file and open it in Power BI Report Builder.
3. Edit the data source to connect to your Xero4PowerBI dataset.

Creating the Report

• Run the report locally in Report Builder.
• By default, it shows the last 30 days of journals, but you can customize the date range (e.g., go back to December 2023).
• The report displays:
  • Journal data ordered by date, transaction type, account, and journal number.
  • Journal numbers link related transactions.

Report Builder Specifics

• Formatting is done via formulas (similar to VBA).
• Customizations:
  • Modify expressions (e.g., date expressions, concatenating account codes and names).
  • Group and filter data using DAX-like syntax (with some custom filters specific to Report Builder).
• Add a logo using Base64 encoding and adjust MIME types as needed.

Tips and Notes

• Backup: Make a copy of the report before making edits.
• Formulas and fonts:
  • Pay attention to formulas and font sizes to avoid rendering issues.
• Export options:
  • Formats include Excel, PDF, and others for flexibility.

Features

• Reports update automatically.
• Options to:
  • Share, subscribe, comment, and add reports to favorites.
  • Export to various formats (e.g., Excel, PDF).

Final Thoughts

• Paginated reports differ from traditional Power BI reports but are easy to learn with online resources.
• Be mindful of precision ("pixel-perfect" formatting) and potential compatibility issues.

Conclusion

Follow the steps to download, customize, and use paginated reports for journals. Experiment with the settings to suit your needs.

We are doing this is because we have been unable to do this directly from the version of Xero4PowerBI in App Source. This is not possible for a variety of technical reasons. There is also no practical way to download large volumes of journals directly from Xero.

What we have here is a version of Xero4PowerBI that will do incremental refresh of journals. This means that if you rely on analysis of journals to validate transaction, you can now access that data quickly and efficiently. Here is the download link and there is an accompanying YouTube video.

When you are ready the PBIX file and open it in Power BI desktop. We're going to publish an incremental report to a workspace, and I'll show you how it's configured.

The issue we have is that Xero accumulates all of your journals, and they take a long time and a lot of processing to download. To overcome the technical limitations, we use Odatalink, which provides value added access to Xero data. OdataLink track the creation date of journals and creates an archive of journals, so that thay can be accessed more readily. We use the creation date of the journal to enable standard Power BI incremental refresh.

We want to do an incremental refresh and that's achieved by setting some parameters which are set up in this report, and we have the Journals table configured to do it. The first step is open the Xero4PowerBIi.pbix file that you have downloaded in PowerBI desktop. From the menu select Transform data->Edit parameters. We are interested in three parameters:

1. Odatalink
2. RangeStart
3. RangeEnd

Set the Odatalink parameter to you OdataLink data feed (this is how we change the data source), set the RangeStart to the date you want your journals to start and RangeEnd to today’s date. If you go to the tables view and right click on the Journals table and click ‘Incremental refresh’ you will see the setting:

1. Select table Journals
2. Set import and refresh ranges

Incrementally refresh this table

Archive data starting 3 Years before refresh date
Data imported from 01/01/2021 to 27/10/2024 (inclusive)
Incrementally refresh data starting
Data will be incrementally refreshed from 28/10/2024 to 29/10/2024 (inclusive)
Incrementally refresh data 2 Days before refresh date

3. Choose optional settings

Get the latest data in real time with DirectQuery (Premium only) Learn more
Selected table cannot be folded for DirectQuery.
Only refresh complete days

Now refresh your data from the menu and your journals will download to the desktop, this may take some time. Normally Xero4PowerBI just cuts off journals for the last 90 days.

The next thing is to publish to the service, select the workspace that you wish to use and publish.

One of the things about incremental refresh is that you have to refresh the data on the desktop first. because once it's in the service, the service takes over totally and takes over refreshing your data for you.

You can do up to 8 refreshes a day, it will default to a midnight refresh.

You, you now have a Power BI report that is incrementally refreshing your journals. We'll cover journal reporting in another blog.

Read more about incremental refresh