Problems with Power BI – Fiscal Year Issue

Problem

There are some problems with Power BI (See Business Intelligence) which include having an issue in displaying statistics in the report according to the fiscal year which I had set in the Timeline Slicer tool.

Let’s review in details of the problem by going through diagrams of Power BI report. The fiscal year set in the Timeline Slicer starts from 1st February.

Timeline Slicer Chart

As you can see from the pictures I have selected Q1 of the year 2012 but the chart displays statistics of Q2 which is invalid.

Timeline Slicer Conjurations

Solution

Let’s suppose the fiscal year of my organization is starting from 1 February and finishing on 31 January. As we all know that normal year starts from 1 January and ends on 31 December. So, In order to solve this problem, I added a new column manually and renamed it ‘fiscal months’. The above-mentioned example is pointing out that 1^st month January in the normal year will be equal to the 1^st month February of the fiscal year which is actually the 2^nd month in the normal year. Considering this, in my new column of “fiscal months”, I adjusted this ratio and then I used the fiscal month column in my report with timeline slicer to fix this problem.

Read 6 signs you need a Business Intelligence solution

The following table shows the adjustment of the fiscal year start against the normal year according to the above-mentioned example:

S/N	Fiscal Year	Normal Year
1	February	January
2	March	February
3	April	March
4	May	April
5	June	May
6	July	June
7	August	July
8	September	August
9	October	September
10	November	October
11	December	November
12	January	December

The following diagrams show the correct data in the charts. No matter which quarter I select in the Timeline Slicer, the charts will show the correct statistics.

Now, after the Solution, I have selected Q1 of 2012 and as you can see from the diagram of the chart, it is not displaying any value. The reason is that Q1 does not have any record. Let’s see by selecting Q2 to check if solution is working fine or not.