Power BI custom visuals for retail

Retail reporting runs on the trading week. On Monday the team looks at sales against last year and against plan by store, category and channel, then at the few products and stores that explain most of the gap. The data is usually large (transactions by store, day and product) and the questions are comparative: like-for-like growth, share of category, sell-through, conversion online. Native Power BI handles the aggregation well and its matrix, bar and line visuals cover the standard pack. What it doesn't draw natively are the views merchandisers sketch on whiteboards: a Pareto of SKUs with the 80% cut-off marked, a trading calendar where each day is coloured by sales against last year, a store league table with sparkline and rank change in one row, or a basket view of which categories sell together.

VizForge generates those as Power BI custom visuals from a description. Say which measure drives the colour, what the threshold is and how stores should be ranked, and the generator writes, type-checks and packages the .pbiviz. It binds to your existing model, so like-for-like flags, retail calendars (4-4-5 or 52/53-week) and your date table keep driving the numbers. For layout, the Design Studio's retail and e-commerce templates give you a background, a theme and a PBIP project with sample data to start from.