A PowerBI Dashboard has been launched to allow Maintained Devon schools to access and view near live finance system (Finest) data. Please find guidance below relating to the initial stages around setting up school user accounts to access the data.
Any transactions input to Finest until 10pm will be extracted and loaded into the data warehouse. The report is then set to update from the data warehouse at 7:30am the next morning, hence the report contains everything from the previous day.
User Account Queries
If you wish to register as a user of the PowerBI dashboard or have any queries with it, please contact us via our Team Mailbox
In your email, please state that your query relates to the Maintained Schools Power BI Dashboard to ensure this reaches to correct team member.
financeschools-mailbox@devon.gov.uk
To register as a user
If you require access to the Power BI dashboard, please provide the following information
- Please provide your email address, this must be a school email address for example: admin@devonprimary-school.devon.sch.uk or other official school domain email address.
- Provide your activity code you require access to, in the format GXXXX.
- Please add your name.
- Add an additional line if you require access to more than one school, in cases where your school may be part of a multiple budget federation. ( We will require approval from the headteacher if you are requesting access to a school different to the one at which you are based. Please request that an email is sent to financeschools-mailbox@devon.gov.uk by the headteacher.)
- Once complete, please return via the email address above.
Power BI Report Access Procedure
Once you have completed the email request requirements above, your account will be created and access will be granted to the following address:
Financial Data for Schools – Power BI
The link will only be accessible with the email address originally provided to us when access was requested. The report will only show transactions relating to the assigned school(s).
Using the Report
The report has recently been expanded to include the trial balance and payroll reports, normally received by schools on a monthly basis, you can now access these as you wish via the updated Power BI. To help you use the report, please see the Quick Card for how to do this and we encourage everyone to have a go. If you have questions or issues, please reach out to your Educational Finance Consultants who will be able to help.
Once logged into the report, there will be a number of filter options for your data, shown on the left hand side of the screen (A screenshot is shown below)
You are able to choose from:
- Transaction Summary Report
- Detailed Transaction Listing
- Spend by Period
- Spend by Entity
- WGA Entities
- Trial Balance
- Payroll Report
Data can be extracted from the report using the menu on the top right of the report data, in any of the four reporting options (See screenshot shown below. Click ‘More Options’ and then ‘Extract Data’ where this data can then be used in Microsoft Excel as required.
Note: Be aware that the ‘More Options’ menu is obscured on the ‘Breakdown’ report but will still allow you to export, please see screenshot below.