Syspro Profit and Loss in Power BI: Full App Walkthrough

A full demonstration of ForesightSA's Profit and Loss Analytics template app for Power BI, built specifically for Syspro® ERP — a ready-made income statement with actual, prior-year, budget and variance views.

Every page in the app runs off the same date logic. Pick a Fiscal Year and Month, and every KPI, chart and table recalculates for that period: month-to-date, year-to-date, and any prior month you want to look back at. More on that below, along with a walkthrough of all eight report pages.

Watch the full demonstration

The video below goes through every page in the app in order: the summary view, the detailed profit and loss, top revenue and expense analysis, waterfall drill-downs, the full account hierarchy, and where your Syspro budgets and GL master data fit in.

Everything is driven by the Fiscal Year/Month slicer

Before we get into the report pages, there's one control that drives all of them: the Fiscal Year and Month slicer on the Read Me page. Every KPI, matrix and chart in the app recalculates from whatever period you select there. No page runs on different date logic to another.

  • Month-to-date (MTD) views show the selected month in isolation.
  • Year-to-date (YTD) views accumulate from the start of the fiscal year through the selected month.
  • It defaults to the current month, but you can go back in time to any prior month in the data — every page, KPI and visual updates to reflect that historical period, so you can review last month, last quarter, or the same month a year ago without changing anything else.

The Read Me page also explains the two other things that shape the whole report: tax and account sort order.

Tax. Most companies don't post tax to the general ledger every month — some post it every six months, some once a year, in whatever period it lands. If you do journalise tax monthly, the app uses your actual GL figures. If you don't, enter a tax rate on the Read Me page and the app calculates tax for you, for both the current year and the prior year, so you still get a Profit and Loss after tax.

Account sort order. ERP systems don't carry a sort order built for your CFO. The app runs off a mapping file — a spreadsheet of your P&L accounts that you control, deciding what sits under cost of sales, operating expenses, or other income, and in what order. You can download your P&L account data straight out of the app to build your own mapping file; a dedicated video on that process is coming.

Report pages

Page 1 — Profit & Loss Summary (MTD/YTD)

Profit and Loss Summary page showing MTD KPIs, a waterfall chart and a matrix view

The landing page opens on a month-to-date view: income, cost of sales, gross profit, opex, operating profit, EBITDA, tax and net profit/loss as KPI tiles across the top, with a waterfall chart and a matrix below. Switching to year-to-date gives the same layout accumulated from the start of the fiscal year. You can drill down from the top-level P&L into a more granular view, then down again to a month-by-month breakdown — and drill through on any line (for example, Sales) to see the full underlying account detail for actual, prior, budget, MTD and YTD in one view.

Page 2 — Full Profit & Loss: Actual/Prior/YTD/Budget

Full Profit and Loss page with actual, prior year, YTD and budget columns

A more detailed version of the P&L, with a summary variant (MTD, per month across the fiscal year) and a fully detailed variant carrying actual, budget and prior-year comparisons with variance amounts and percentages. Both drill down from the top level, through a secondary grouping, down to individual account codes.

Page 3 — Top Revenue and Expense

Top revenue and expense accounts page with actual vs budget bars

A focused KPI view of your top revenue and expense accounts — actual against budget, with everything outside the top five grouped into "Other" so the totals still reconcile. A filter pane lets you control how much detail shows in the top-accounts list.

Page 4 — Waterfall & Line Account Analysis

Waterfall and line chart account analysis page

A waterfall chart and a line chart covering every top-level element of the P&L, from sales down to net profit. Click any segment — cost of sales, for instance — to drill into its detailed accounts. Note that the date slicers on this page (and the others) aren't synchronised with each other by design, so you can hold a different period on each visual without one changing the rest.

Page 5 — Full Hierarchy Profit & Loss

Full hierarchy Profit and Loss matrix with actual, budget and prior year values

A single detailed matrix visual carrying actual, budget and prior-year values, drillable down to the third level of the P&L hierarchy. It's the most data-dense page in the app, so keep that in mind for performance if you extend it further.

Page 6 — Drill-Through Page

Profit and Loss detail drill-through page

The dedicated drill-through target used by the other pages, which also works as a standalone detail view in its own right.

Page 7 — Syspro Budgets

Syspro Budgets page shown as a matrix by period and as a list view

Your budgets as loaded from Syspro, shown two ways: a matrix with periods across the top, and a simple list view — useful for checking what's actually been budgeted before you query why actual is tracking against it the way it is.

Page 8 — UDM GL Master Download

UDM GL Master Download page for building the account mapping file

Where you download the GL master data needed to build or update your mapping file (the account sort-order spreadsheet covered above). A dedicated video will walk through that whole process.

Running Syspro® on an on-premises SQL Server? This app connects through the Microsoft on-premises data gateway rather than a direct cloud connection. See our dedicated walkthrough — Power BI Syspro Template App: On-Premises Connection (also on YouTube) — for the full setup, from installing the gateway to scheduling a daily refresh.

Useful Microsoft documentation

Syspro® is a registered trademark of Syspro Software Ltd. Foresight SA is an independent company and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Syspro Software Ltd.

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