Managing 30+ federal grants across five agencies (NOAA, NSF, EDA, EPA, DOE) meant our finance team lived in spreadsheet hell. Every executive request—"Which proposals are aging past 180 days?" "What's our burn rate on NOAA projects?"—required hours of manual data extraction from Financial Edge NXT, Excel manipulation, and reconciliation. By the time we finished, the data was already outdated.
We eliminated all of that.
At Gulf of Maine Research Institute, I built two executive Power BI dashboards that connect directly to Financial Edge NXT using certified Power BI connectors and Power Automate. The data is live, auto-refreshing, and requires zero manual intervention. No exports. No spreadsheets. No reconciliation.
SPO Funding Pipeline Dashboard gives our COO real-time visibility into 25 pending proposals totaling over $12.23M, broken down by agency, department, strategic initiative, and proposal age. We now proactively manage aging proposals instead of reacting to missed opportunities.
FY26 Budget Performance Dashboard tracks our $19.75M budget across seven departments with live variance analysis and burn rates—critical for federal grant compliance where overspending isn't an option.
You'll see both dashboards live and learn:

How to connect Financial Edge NXT to Power BI using certified connectors 

The Power Automate workflow that keeps everything synchronized automatically
Dashboard design principles that got our executives to actually use them daily
Federal grant compliance considerations for Single Audit readiness
Realistic cost-benefit analysis: time investment vs. value delivered