Bank Statement Modelling - One Flat File or Break into Dimensions (and their relationships)?

[jtar40]

Hey Folks,

Newb here. I have a few bank accounts and want to develop a financial model with power pivot and/or Power Bi.

I'm having a hard time figuring out if its necessary to break out and create dimensions and their relationships to the Fact Table.

Do you think cleaning up the data in power query and creating one table with all the typical banking columns is best to keep things simple, or do I need to start breaking that table down into dimensions?

Thank you?

 

[severynm]

Being relatively new to this myself, I'll offer my thoughts.

Usually, it's better to use multiple tables instead of one massive one. However, I'd also think it depends a little bit on where you are getting the data from and what the structure of your data is. If your data comes from a single source only, then i might suggest keeping it as one table, but if any of the pieces of data have any "sub-components" that you want to include as well (i.e. a bank account might have an id, customer name, address, etc.), then you'll likely want to keep those as separate tables and relate them together. There's a variety of answers out there for one vs many tables, but I liked this one a lot.