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How to Create a Daily Report in Power BI

Cody Schneider•

A daily report isn't just another task to check off your list - it's how you get a daily pulse on your business. Creating one in Power BI can pull live data from your key platforms and show you what happened yesterday or what’s happening today, allowing your team to act fast. We'll walk through how to connect your data, design a clear report, set up automatic daily filtering, and schedule it to hit your team's inbox every morning.

What Should You Include in a Daily Report?

Before diving into Power BI, decide on the handful of critical metrics that tell the story of your day. A cluttered report is an ignored report, so focus on the numbers that drive immediate decisions. The right metrics depend entirely on your team's function.

Here are a few examples to get you started:

  • Sales Teams: Daily leads generated, discovery calls booked, deals moved to the next stage, and revenue closed. These metrics help sales managers adjust strategies and support reps in near real-time.

  • Marketing Teams: Website visitors, new email subscribers, social media engagement, and ad spend vs. conversions for key campaigns. This lets marketers quickly see if a new campaign is performing as expected.

  • E-commerce Stores: Daily revenue, total orders, average order value (AOV), conversion rate, and top-selling products. Keeping an eye on these helps identify sales trends or spot issues with the checkout process.

  • Support & Operations: New tickets created, tickets resolved, and average first-response time. This helps leaders manage a team's workload and maintain customer satisfaction.

Pick 3-5 of your most important metrics to be the stars of your daily report. The goal is clarity, not complexity.

Step 1: Get Your Data Into Power BI

Your journey begins in the Power BI Desktop app. The first step is to connect to the source where your data lives. This could be anything from a simple spreadsheet to a complex cloud database.

Connecting to a Data Source

Power BI supports hundreds of data sources. For this tutorial, we’ll use a common scenario: connecting to an Excel file or a CSV exported from your CRM or e-commerce platform.

  1. On the Home tab of the Power BI ribbon, click Get Data.

  2. Select your data source type. If it's a spreadsheet, choose Excel workbook or Text/CSV. If your data is in a database, choose SQL Server or another option.

  3. Navigate to your file, select it, and click Open.

  4. A Navigator window will appear, showing you the sheets or tables within your file. Select the one you need and a preview will appear on the right.

At the bottom, you’ll see two options: Load and Transform Data. Always choose Transform Data. This opens the Power Query Editor, which is where you clean and prepare your data for reporting.

Cleaning Data in Power Query

Reliable reports are built on clean data. Here are a few essential steps inside the Power Query Editor:

  • Check Data Types: Power BI is pretty good at guessing, but you should always verify that your data types are correct. The most important column for a daily report is your date column. Click the calendar icon at the top of the date column and make sure it’s set to Date or Date/Time. Numbers should be "Decimal Number" or "Whole Number," and text should be "Text."

  • Remove Unnecessary Columns: Your source file might have dozens of columns you don't need. A leaner data model performs better. Right-click the header of any column you won’t be using in your report and select Remove.

  • Filter Out Errors or Nulls: If your columns have errors or empty rows (nulls), you can filter them out by clicking the dropdown arrow on the column header and unchecking (error) or (null).

Once you’re satisfied, click Close & Apply in the top-left corner. Power BI will load the cleaned data into your report model.

Step 2: Design Your Report Visuals

With your data loaded, you can now start building the visual part of your report. Switch to the "Report" view (the first icon on the left-hand pane). The goal is to present your key daily metrics clearly and concisely.

Picking the Right Charts

Different visuals tell different stories. For a daily report, a few types are especially useful:

  • Card: Perfect for showing a single, important number like "Today's Revenue" or "New Leads Today." They are impossible to misread and grab attention immediately.

  • Line Chart: Use a line chart to show a trend over the last 7 or 14 days. This gives your daily number valuable context. Is today’s sales figure an outlier or part of a larger trend?

  • Bar or Column Chart: Ideal for comparing values across different categories. For example, a bar chart can easily show "Sales by Product Category Today" or "Support Tickets Resolved by Agent."

  • Table: If you need to drill into the details, a simple table is often best. Use it to provide a list of recent transactions or high-priority customer support tickets from the day.

Example: Building a Simple Sales Dashboard

Let’s add a few visuals from our sample sales data:

  1. Create a Card for Today's Sales: From the "Visualizations" pane, click the Card icon. Drag your "Sales Amount" field from the "Data" pane on the right onto the "Fields" area of the visualization. This will show the total sales from your entire dataset, but don't worry - we'll filter it down to today's data in the next step.

  2. Add a Trendline: Click the Line chart icon. Drag your "OrderDate" field to the X-axis and "Sales Amount" to the Y-axis. This gives you a view of sales over time.

  3. Show Top Products: Click the Bar chart icon. Drag "Product" to the Y-axis and "Units Sold" to the X-axis to see which products are performing best.

At this point, you have a nice-looking report, but it's showing all of your historical data. Let's fix that.

Step 3: Filter for Today's Data Automatically

This is the secret sauce to creating a truly daily report. You need to apply a filter that automatically updates to only show the current day's information every time the report refreshes.

Method 1: Using the Relative Date Filter (Fast & Easy)

The simplest way to filter for today is by using Power BI's built-in relative date filter.

  1. Make sure you don't have any specific visuals selected by clicking an empty space on your report canvas. This ensures the filter applies to the entire page.

  2. In the Filters pane on the right, drag your main date column (e.g., "OrderDate") into the area that says "Filters on this page."

  3. Click on the dropdown under "Filter type" and select Relative date.

  4. Another dropdown will appear. Change "in the last" to "is in this" and set the middle dropdown to "day".

That's it! Your entire report page will now dynamically update to only show data for the current day. To show data from the previous day (if your data only refreshes overnight), you can set the filter to "is in the last 1 days" or use "is yesterday."

Method 2: Using a DAX Flag (More Flexible)

For more control, you can use DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) to create a calculated column that flags today's data.

  1. Go to the "Data" view (the second icon on the left-hand pane).

  2. Select the table containing your date field.

  3. From the Table tools ribbon, click New column.

  4. Enter the following DAX formula in the formula bar, replacing DateTable[OrderDate] with your own table and column names:

IsToday = IF(DateTable[OrderDate] = TODAY(), "Today", "Past")

  1. Press Enter. This creates a new column in your table that will say "Today" for any row with today's date and "Past" for all others.

Now, go back to the "Report" view. You can drag this new "IsToday" column into the "Filters on this page" area and select only "Today." This method is helpful if you want to create a dropdown slicer on your report that lets users toggle between viewing data for "Today" and for "Past" periods.

Step 4: Automate and Schedule Your Report

Once your report is built in Power BI Desktop, you need to publish it to the Power BI Service (app.powerbi.com) to automate its delivery.

Publish to the Power BI Service

On the Home tab in Power BI Desktop, click the Publish button. You’ll be prompted to sign in to your Power BI account and choose a workspace to publish to. "My workspace" is fine for personal reports, but for team reports, you should use a shared workspace.

Set a Scheduled Refresh

A daily report isn't useful if the data is stale. You need to set up a scheduled refresh so it fetches the latest data daily.

  1. In your Power BI Service workspace, find the dataset for your new report (it will have the same name as your file) and click the ellipsis (...) next to it, then select Settings.

  2. Expand the Scheduled refresh section.

  3. Toggle "Keep your data up to date" to On.

  4. Set the "Refresh frequency" to Daily.

  5. Under "Time," click Add another time and select the time of day you want the refresh to happen, like 7:00 AM, so the report is ready before the workday starts.

  6. Click Apply.

Note: If you are connecting to an on-premises data source (like a local SQL Server or an Excel file on your computer), you will need to configure a data gateway. A gateway acts as a secure bridge that allows the Power BI cloud service to access your local data.

Subscribe Your Team to the Report

The final step is to put the report on autopilot. Instead of requiring people to log in to Power BI, you can have a snapshot delivered straight to their email inbox.

  1. Open the report in your Power BI Service workspace.

  2. At the top of the report, click Subscribe.

  3. Click Add new subscription.

  4. In the "To" field, enter the email addresses of the recipients.

  5. Give the email a clear subject line, like "Daily Sales Performance Report."

  6. Set the Frequency to Daily and choose a Scheduled Time (usually right after your data refresh is complete).

  7. Click Save and close.

Your team will now receive a fresh, automated daily report every single morning, giving them the insights they need to start their day off right.

Final Thoughts

Building an automated daily report in Power BI involves connecting your data, designing clear visuals, applying a smart relative date filter, and scheduling a refresh. Once it's set up, it empowers your team with timely information to spot trends, tackle problems, and make smarter, data-informed decisions every day.

While Power BI is incredibly powerful, we know the setup process - configuring data gateways, learning DAX, and navigating Power Query - can feel overwhelming, especially for marketing and sales teams who just need quick answers. At Graphed, we streamline this entire workflow. Instead of building reports manually, you just connect your platforms like Google Analytics, Shopify, or HubSpot, and then ask for what you need in plain English: "Show me a dashboard of daily sales for the last 30 days." We build the live, interactive report for you in seconds, saving you hours of setup and giving your whole team direct access to the insights they need.