Planning in Microsoft Fabric lets you build budgets, forecasts, and scenarios directly on your Power BI semantic models. Fabric Planning gives finance, sales, operations, and HR teams a single, no-code planning platform that eliminates spreadsheet silos, consultant dependency, and months-long implementations.
Planning sheets in Fabric Planning support every method your organization needs on a single, no-code platform.
Strategic Planning
Set multi-year objectives and cascade them into actionable financial targets that align every department with the organization’s direction.
Top-Down / Bottom-Up Planning
Set targets at the top, collect input from the field, and reconcile both in one workspace with approvals and audit trails.
Driver-Based Planning
Model around the drivers that matter: headcount, unit volume, price points, conversion rates. See how assumption changes ripple through your P&L instantly.
Scenario Planning
Create and compare what-if scenarios side by side. Test different revenue assumptions, cost structures, or market conditions and decide with confidence.
Rolling Forecasts
Move beyond static annual budgets. Forecast 12-18 months ahead on a rolling basis and continuously update expectations as actuals come in.
Integrated Planning (xP&A)
Unify financial, sales, HR, and operational plans in one environment. Every function contributes to a single consolidated view instead of department-by-department fragments.
Ad-Hoc Planning
Spin up quick what-if models for re-orgs, acquisitions, or market shifts in minutes. No formal budget cycle, no IT involvement required.
Simulations
Stress-test plans with sensitivity analysis and what-if simulations. Quantify risk, identify high-impact drivers, and plan for a range of outcomes.
The Problem
Planning silos cause data silos
Legacy planning tools create fragmented data across platforms, requiring redundant ETL, integration, and reconciliation just to get a single view of the truth.
Built for Business Users
Self-service planning in Microsoft Fabric, no IT required
Fabric Planning is designed so business users can independently create and manage complex plans, significantly reducing reliance on IT support and external consultants.
Rapid Plan Creation
Launch your first plan in minutes, not months. Because Fabric Planning works directly on existing semantic models where your enterprise knowledge is already codified, there is no re-modeling phase. An intuitive, no-code interface means business users own the process from day one.
Familiar, Spreadsheet-Like Experience
Business users work in an interface that feels like the spreadsheets they already know - with the governance, collaboration, and scale that spreadsheets can’t provide.
Dynamic Adaptability
Easily update and adjust plans to respond to changing market conditions and unforeseen events. Your strategy stays agile and relevant, and your team doesn’t need to wait for IT to rebuild templates.
Collaborative Planning
Planning is not a solo activity. Managers set targets, reps contribute forecasts, controllers challenge assumptions, and leadership approves. Fabric Planning supports multi-user, multi-role planning with cell-level commenting, threaded conversations, and challenge-approve workflows built into every plan.
Connected Planning
Integrate plans with ease
Fabric Planning lets you connect plans across teams and departments - so a change in your revenue forecast automatically flows into headcount, cash flow, and operational plans.
1
Real-time connections between plans
Link plans so outputs from one become inputs for another - revenue targets drive headcount assumptions, headcount drives compensation budgets, and so on. All in real time.
2
Automatic data transformation
Transform and map data as it flows between plans - aggregate, allocate, convert currencies, or reclassify accounts - all handled automatically, with no manual exports or reconciliation steps.
3
Event-driven updates
On-change triggers automatically refresh downstream plans when an input changes. Update a growth rate in your revenue plan and it cascades through hiring targets, OpEx projections, and cash flow in real time.
Plan more. Manage less.
Fabric Planning is built natively into Microsoft Fabric as part of Fabric IQ, so it operates directly on your data in OneLake - inheriting your existing security, eliminating data silos, and removing fragile ETL pipelines.
Entra ID & workspace-level security
Access follows the Fabric workspace roles and Entra ID identities you already manage. There’s no separate user directory to maintain.
No data duplication or ETL pipelines
Plans read actuals from your semantic models in place, so there’s nothing to copy, sync or reconcile.
Read from semantic models, write back to Fabric
Pull actuals from Power BI semantic models and write plans, forecasts and scenarios back to a Fabric SQL database.
Usage-based Fabric pricing
Planning runs on your Fabric capacity, so cost tracks usage, not seat count.
High-performance calculation engine (preview)
Work across tens of millions of cells, with dependent calculations updating the moment an input changes.
A Better Way to Plan
The old way was built for vendors. The new way is built for you.
The old way
Siloed platforms. Locked data. Slow to start, expensive to grow.
Months of consultant-led implementation before anyone can plan
Plans locked in a proprietary data store, disconnected from actuals
Per-seat licenses force teams to ration access; most users stay in Excel
Every new use case means another SOW, another budget cycle, another 6 months
Only structured budgets supported. Ad-hoc planning stays in spreadsheets.
VS.
The new way
Plan on your data platform. Self-service. Minutes to start.
No-code, self-service: business users launch their first plan in minutes
Plans and actuals coexist on Fabric. Zero ETL, zero duplication
Compute-based pricing: everyone who needs to plan can plan
Expand to sales, ops, or HR without a new SOW or consultant cycle
Structured budgets and ad-hoc what-if analysis, both first-class
Compute-Based Pricing
Pay for what you use, not how many users you have
Traditional per-seat licensing forces you to limit who can build or access your data apps. Compute-based pricing on Fabric removes that constraint.
A department head who reviews a forecast once a quarter and an FP&A analyst running daily scenarios are not billed the same. Costs reflect actual usage.
Give every budget owner, controller, and executive access to planning without adding per-seat licenses.
As planning adoption grows across your organization, costs scale with consumption, not headcount.
See what your Fabric capacity costs
Planning, Intelligence and PowerTable all run on your Fabric capacity. Check SKU pricing for your region, or estimate the capacity your workloads need.
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