Budgets belong in your data platform now

For most organisations, planning has always lived next door to the data — never quite inside it. Budgets in spreadsheets, forecasts in a standalone EPM tool, actuals in the data warehouse. Connecting them took effort, and by the time everything was reconciled, the numbers were already drifting. Planning in Fabric IQ takes direct aim at that problem.

The core idea is straightforward: rather than treating planning as a separate discipline that occasionally visits your data platform, it becomes a native part of it. Budgets, forecasts, targets, and scenario models live directly on top of the same Power BI semantic models and OneLake data your reporting already runs on. No ETL to maintain, no separate source of truth, no reconciliation cycle.

Planning and analytics finally share the same foundation — which means actuals, targets, and assumptions are always in sync.

Under the hood, the Plan item in Fabric IQ brings together three components. Planning sheets handle budgeting, forecasting, and scenario modelling in a spreadsheet-like experience. PowerTable sheets support large dimensional models for structured, scale-ready input. Intelligence sheets provide integrated reporting and variance analysis — plan versus actuals, right alongside the planning work itself. InfoBridge connects and keeps data aligned across Fabric workloads.

From a technical perspective, this addresses something the planning community has been waiting on. Fabric’s semantic model was always read-only — a significant gap for anyone trying to build a planning layer on the platform. The Plan item solves this natively, with writeback governed through Fabric’s own security and monitored through Purview. 

What it costs

Planning runs on Fabric Capacity Units — no separate per-seat licence. If you are already on Fabric, it adds nothing to your bill right now: meters exist but are not yet charged, with billing expected by June 2026.

When to start

The strongest case for starting now is if your reporting already runs on Fabric — planning becomes a natural, zero-licence extension. Departmental budgeting and replacing spreadsheet-based cycles are well-served today. If you have complex enterprise FP&A needs — large concurrent user volumes, deep allocation logic, or multi-entity consolidation — it is worth piloting carefully before committing, as the capability is still maturing in public preview.

How it compares

Fabric IQ Planning’s clearest advantage over standalone EPM tools is removing the data silo entirely — no connector, no reconciliation, no separate licence, and planning data that stays in sync with your reporting by design. Because it is first-party and co-engineered with Microsoft, it also inherits Fabric’s security, governance, and Purview monitoring without any extra configuration. For organisations already on Fabric, the onboarding is genuinely low-friction.

The trade-offs are real, though. Being in public preview means feature completeness is still evolving — complex allocation logic, driver-based modelling, and large concurrent user scenarios are areas where dedicated planning platforms built on Fabric still have the edge. Those tools also tend to offer richer Excel-native interfaces and pre-built ERP connectors, which matter a lot for finance teams who live in Excel or pull directly from SAP and Oracle. The no-code experience in Fabric IQ Planning is strong for standard budgeting and forecasting; it has sensible limits at the edges of advanced finance logic.

For most organisations the sensible path is to start with Fabric IQ Planning for departmental and standard use cases now — and revisit specialist tooling only if requirements outgrow it.

The direction is genuinely promising. The long-standing ambition — one platform where the same team, the same semantic model, and the same governance framework serves both reporting and planning — is now closer to reality than it has ever been in the Microsoft stack. The preview window is the right moment to start exploring.

If you’d like to talk through what this means for your organisation — whether you’re evaluating Fabric for the first time or thinking about how planning fits into an existing setup — we’d love to have a conversation. Book a call here.