deFacto Global Blog

Supercharge Power BI with the Full Power of Planning with deFacto

August 25, 2025

deFacto Global

Extend Your Planning Reach to Every Stakeholder to Orchestrate Decision Making and Optimize Business Performance.

At deFacto, we believe your planning platform should do more than crunch numbers—it should connect every corner of your business. That’s why our new, deep integration with Power BI, added to our award-winning Excel integration, is a game-changer for modern planning teams.

Turn Power BI into a Planning Command Center

deFacto now gives you live, two-way integration with both Excel and Power BI—allowing users not only to visualize plans but to interact with them, write back data, and shape outcomes directly from their reports.

Whether you’re managing revenue forecasts, workforce budgets, supply chain, or operational models, you can analyze, adjust, and act—all within the same interface.

What Makes This Powerful:

• Live Connectivity: Connect your financial or operational data directly to Power BI.
• Full Write-back: Input changes directly from Power BI into your planning models.
• Automated Templates: Eliminate repetitive reporting with reusable, dynamic report templates.
• Microsoft Native: Built to work seamlessly with the Microsoft tech stack, including Azure and Microsoft Fabric.

Case Study Spotlight: Planning That Scales with the Business

A national restaurant group with 200+ locations needed a way to bring structure and speed to their budgeting and operational planning process. The challenge? Their finance team was locked into a cumbersome, manual Excel process that couldn’t scale—and store managers had no easy way to contribute their insights.

deFacto changed the game.

The Solution:

• The finance team builds out the corporate budget using deFacto’s robust financial modeling engine through their Excel interface.
• That model is then accessible via live Power BI dashboards, customized for each store location based on their security levels.
• Store directors adjust assumptions—from staffing to local sales projections—right from within Power BI.
• All updates flow directly back into the central model through live writeback, giving corporate finance teams immediate visibility into the bottom-line impact.

The Results:

• Time to build budgets reduced by over 50%
• Increased ownership and full participation at the store level
• Unified platform now supports financial budgeting, retail sales planning, and staff planning
• The organization now runs an agile, location-aware planning process with zero duplication and full transparency
• This case demonstrates what’s possible when you extend planning directly with the tools your business leaders already use—no more disjointed spreadsheets, no more siloed planning.

One Platform. Endless Possibilities.

From FP&A and sales forecasting to supply chain, HR, and capex planning—deFacto helps you bring it all together. By embedding planning into Power BI, every report becomes a living tool for performance optimization.

Why It Matters

When your plans are accessible, interactive, and trusted across the business, decisions get better—and so do results.

Ready to put your data to work?

Let’s talk about how deFacto can turn your Power BI investment into a full-fledged planning platform.