Business Intelligence for Finance: Financial Reporting, Planning Analytics, and Board-Ready Views

A company's BI team builds financial dashboards. The FP&A team uses them for a month, then stops. The reason is always the same: the numbers don't quite match what FP&A produces from the GL, and the FP&A team doesn't have time to investigate every variance between the dashboard and their own reports. The BI team insists the dashboards are correct. The FP&A team knows the GL is correct. The gap — usually caused by timing of adjusting entries, hierarchy differences, or eliminated intercompany — is small enough to be plausible and large enough to be distracting. The FP&A team goes back to the reports they build themselves from the GL, which they trust because they produced them.

Finance BI done right treats GL reconciliation as the non-negotiable foundation. The semantic layer sources from the post-close trial balance with all adjustments. The hierarchies match what the controller uses. The data refresh timing captures the final close entries. With this foundation, the FP&A team trusts the numbers because they can trace any total back to the GL. From there, BI adds the analysis layer FP&A can't easily build in the GL — trend analysis, peer comparison, scenario modeling, and the board-ready visualizations that communicate the story. Done with this discipline, BI becomes FP&A's primary tool. Done without the reconciliation foundation, it becomes a parallel system nobody trusts.