22-25 April 2026 
SQLBits 2024
What does Microsoft Fabric mean for a Finance/Business Analyst?
For a business team such as Finance, Microsoft Fabric allows you to go from being “IT reliant” to “IT enabled” and this session shows you how!
Whether you’re a data explorer, data analyst, data engineer – or perhaps a newly coined analytics engineer – we will explore what Microsoft Fabric means for you. We will look at the need for the data platform components in Fabric, applied for a finance data use case, and consider the benefits of this being in a SaaS lakehouse architecture. We will also consider how you need to organise your Finance and IT teams to work best with Fabric so that you have the right capabilities to deliver meaningful financial insights at scale.
Based on his talk to several hundred chartered accountants for the ICAEW in the UK (https://events.icaew.com/pd/28376/microsoft-fabric-what-is-it-and-why-should-yo), Rishi will look at what Microsoft Fabric is and what it means to a finance analyst who is used to working with Excel and Power BI.
We will start with looking at how financial reporting has evolved over time towards being more self-service driven with Power BI, and some of the challenges this presents when not supported by a cloud data platform. (Transactional finance data in particular needs a lot of work to be used for analytical purposes and this needs to be done in an auditable, scalable and performant manner!).
With the need for a data platform established, we will look at how Microsoft Fabric brings much of this capability back into the hands of technically minded finance staff who are now able to self-serve on the entire analytics process. We will explore the concepts of lakehouses and OneLake being the single location for all finance data (rather than much of it being kept in local Excel files!) and consider the benefits of all analytical workloads being able to utilise this data without having to duplicate it.
Finally we will look at how Fabric needs to be implemented across the Finance and IT functions in order to reap its benefits. This includes getting the right operating model (based on data mesh or CoE models) and considering the needs and skillsets of different individuals who work with data (e.g Data Explorers, Data Analysts, Data Engineers and Analytics Engineers!).
We will start with looking at how financial reporting has evolved over time towards being more self-service driven with Power BI, and some of the challenges this presents when not supported by a cloud data platform. (Transactional finance data in particular needs a lot of work to be used for analytical purposes and this needs to be done in an auditable, scalable and performant manner!).
With the need for a data platform established, we will look at how Microsoft Fabric brings much of this capability back into the hands of technically minded finance staff who are now able to self-serve on the entire analytics process. We will explore the concepts of lakehouses and OneLake being the single location for all finance data (rather than much of it being kept in local Excel files!) and consider the benefits of all analytical workloads being able to utilise this data without having to duplicate it.
Finally we will look at how Fabric needs to be implemented across the Finance and IT functions in order to reap its benefits. This includes getting the right operating model (based on data mesh or CoE models) and considering the needs and skillsets of different individuals who work with data (e.g Data Explorers, Data Analysts, Data Engineers and Analytics Engineers!).
Speakers
Rishi Sapra's other proposed sessions for 2026
Data Storytelling in Power BI: From Reports to Narratives - 2026
From Excel to Fabric with AI Agents: Automating Migration with MCP Servers - 2026
From Manual Month-End to AI-Powered Finance: Building Self-Service Analytics in Fabric - 2026
From SAP Extracts to AI-Powered Insights with Business Process Solutions - 2026
From Strategy to Execution: Building AI-Ready Data Products with Microsoft Fabric - 2026
Taming the Firehose: Technical Acceleration and ADHD - 2026
Rishi Sapra's previous sessions
What does Microsoft Fabric mean for a Finance/Business Analyst?
For a business team such as Finance, Microsoft Fabric allows you to go from being “IT reliant” to “IT enabled” and this session shows you how!
Whether you’re a data explorer, data analyst, data engineer – or perhaps a newly coined analytics engineer – we will explore what Microsoft Fabric means for you. We will look at the need for the data platform components in Fabric, applied for a finance data use case, and consider the benefits of this being in a SaaS lakehouse architecture. We will also consider how you need to organise your Finance and IT teams to work best with Fabric so that you have the right capabilities to deliver meaningful financial insights at scale.
How to learn fast-changing tech in a post pandemic, Attention-starved world
Struggling to figure out how to learn about new features and pick up new skills in a technology environment that is moving so fast? In this session, Rishi will highlight some key principles of instructional design and how you can use them to become a better learner or teacher!
Power BI Governance: 6 steps to success
Learn how to deploy Power BI at scale within a large Enterprise. The mantra behind this is “discipline at the core, flexibility at the edge” - we will cover deploying appropriate guardrails/controls whilst still retaining the notion of “self-service” within the organization.
Storytelling With Data
Learn how to present arguments with data to effectively communicate the insights you need to get across
Tips and Tricks for working with Finance Data in Power BI
<p>Excel has always been the tool of choice for the finance team with the flexibility it provides for logic, formatting and presentation of numbers. But this flexibility has also caused Governance nightmares, performance issues and huge risks with manual processes. Is it possible to also achieve the desired outcomes and flexibility with Power BI whilst also having all the benefits of working in a more controlled, automated and feature-rich environment? Yes!
In this session Rishi will show how you can have your finance cake and eat it, showing how to build dynamically formatted financial statements , waterfall charts and KPIs in Power BI to tell an engaging story with finance data.
The Incidental Business Analyst (BA) – Designing a Finance Power BI Data Model to Tell a Story
Join this session to learn the key steps in designing a data model: Know Your Audience (KYA), Complete a Scoping Template, Define the data granularity/scope and design a conceptual model. We will use time-tested methodologies based on Kimball Data modelling techniques, including a Bus Matrix and Starnet, complete with templates available for you to freely download.