What Is Microsoft Fabric Plan? Guide, Pricing, and Setup

Most FP&A teams are stuck running their planning process outside the same platform where their actuals live. Budgets get built in Excel or a bolted-on EPM tool, actuals get built in Power BI, and someone spends hours every close reconciling the two.

Microsoft Fabric Plan was built to close that gap. In our webinar with Lumel, “Plan Smarter, Faster: Inside Microsoft Fabric Plan,” Collectiv’s Dennis Carriere and Lumel’s Liran Edelist walked through exactly how Fabric Plan works, what it costs, and how it connects directly to the Power BI semantic models organizations already have in place. Watch the full session below, or keep reading for a breakdown of what Fabric Plan is, how its three core components work, and the questions we heard most from the audience.

What Is Microsoft Fabric Plan?

Fabric Plan is a planning, budgeting, and forecasting workload built directly into Microsoft Fabric, released as part of the Fabric IQ workload at FabCon Atlanta in March 2026. It was developed in partnership with Lumel, and it’s designed to solve a specific problem: Power BI has always been strong for reporting on what already happened, but it hasn’t historically supported writing data back into a plan, a forecast, or a budget.

Fabric Plan changes that. As Dennis put it during the webinar,

Power BI is no longer just a one-way street for reporting. It’s now a two-way street for writeback planning and forecasting directly inside the Fabric ecosystem.

That matters because most organizations aren’t just trying to solve a reporting problem. They’re trying to solve a data silo problem. Planning tools that live outside Fabric mean exporting data out of an ERP or financial system, importing it into a separate proprietary platform, and manually keeping it in sync. Fabric Plan removes that step entirely.

What Are the Three Core Components of Fabric Plan?

Fabric Plan isn’t a single feature. It’s three distinct tools that work together, and understanding the difference is the fastest way to understand what Fabric Plan can actually do.

Planning Sheets

Planning Sheets are where scenario-based planning happens: budgets, forecasts, driver-based models, and time-based calculations. If your team currently builds a budget in Excel, or in a third-party FP&A platform, Planning Sheets are the direct replacement, built to sit on top of your existing Power BI semantic model rather than requiring a separate data structure.

Power Table

Power Table is a master data management tool. It’s built for organizations managing reference data (a chart of accounts, a customer list, a product hierarchy) that currently lives in an offline spreadsheet because it can’t be fully captured in an ERP or financial system. Power Table brings that data management inside Fabric, with governance, approval workflows, and audit history built in.

Intelligence Sheets

Intelligence Sheets are the reporting layer, with over 100 chart types built to work directly with data from Planning Sheets and Power Table. This is where planning data and reporting come together in one place instead of living in two disconnected tools.

How Does Fabric Plan Use Your Existing Power BI Semantic Model?

This is the detail that separates Fabric Plan from traditional EPM tools: there is no separate data integration required. If the data you want to plan against already exists in your Power BI semantic model, Fabric Plan uses it directly.

As Liran explained on the webinar, there are already tens of millions of semantic models built across organizations worldwide. Building a separate one just for planning would mean duplicating work that’s already been done. Fabric Plan is built on the idea that planning data, reporting data, and AI-ready data should all live in the same place, under the same governance, rather than in separate silos that someone has to reconcile manually.

This is also why a well-built Power BI semantic model matters more than ever. The same relationships, measures, and metadata that make your reporting reliable are what make Fabric Plan, and any Copilot or AI agent built on top of your data, work well.

How Does Fabric Plan Licensing and Pricing Work?

Fabric Plan doesn’t require a separate per-user license. It runs on your existing Fabric capacity, and it’s billed on a usage basis rather than a seat basis.

Practically, that means:

There’s no minimum user commitment and no multi-year contract requirement
Usage is measured in Fabric capacity units, and different activities (building a report versus viewing or updating data) consume different amounts of capacity
Each user session runs on a 30-day basis, so infrequent planners (someone who only touches the budget once a quarter) don’t drive ongoing cost the way a traditional per-seat license would

This is a meaningful shift from how most EPM and planning tools are priced, and it’s one of the reasons Fabric Plan is generating so much interest from FP&A teams already investing in Fabric capacity for other workloads.

How Does Writeback Work in Fabric Plan?

When you build a budget or forecast in a Planning Sheet, that data writes back directly to your underlying database. Fabric Plan typically writes to a new fact table, which then becomes part of your semantic model and can be reused in Power BI reports immediately.

This supports common FP&A scenarios directly, including:

Rolling forecasts, where actuals close out month by month while the remaining open periods stay available for forecasting, with the option to default forecasted periods to the existing budget instead of starting from a blank sheet
Statistical forecasting, using built-in prediction functions that support single or multi-seasonality models, run at either a bottom-up or top-down level
Scenario planning, where new assumptions get created as a separate scenario without overwriting the baseline budget, so you can compare a “2+10” or “3+9” forecast against the original plan side by side

How Does Governance and Security Work in Fabric Plan?

Security in Fabric Plan works across three layers:

Workspace-level access determines who can get anywhere near a given Fabric workspace, which matters for sensitive data like salary planning.
Row-level security in the semantic layer carries over from your existing Power BI security setup. A department manager sees their department; regional teams see their region.
Application-level permissions inside Fabric Plan itself, which let you control who can change scenarios, submit approvals, or edit specific measures, independent of the underlying data security.

Power Table adds a fourth layer specific to master data: built-in approval workflows. Changes to sensitive reference data, like a chart of accounts, can require sign-off from a specific approver before they save to the database, with full audit history and Microsoft Teams notifications built in.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Microsoft Fabric Plan? Fabric Plan is a planning, budgeting, and forecasting workload inside Microsoft Fabric, built in partnership with Lumel and released as part of the Fabric IQ workload in March 2026. It adds writeback, scenario planning, and master data management directly on top of existing Power BI semantic models.

Does Fabric Plan require a separate license? No. Fabric Plan runs on existing Fabric capacity and is billed on a usage basis rather than a per-user license, with no multi-year commitment required.

Do I need to duplicate my data to use Fabric Plan? No. Fabric Plan is designed to run directly on top of your existing Power BI semantic model. If your planning data already exists there, no separate integration, import, or duplicate data structure is needed.

What’s the difference between Planning Sheets and Power Table? Planning Sheets are built for scenario-based planning, budgeting, and forecasting. Power Table is a master data management tool for reference data like a chart of accounts, product list, or customer hierarchy, with built-in governance and approval workflows.

Can Fabric Plan support rolling forecasts? Yes. Fabric Plan supports hybrid forecasting models where closed periods pull in actuals and open periods remain available for forecasting, including the option to default open periods to the existing budget or run statistical predictions.

How does row-level security work in Fabric Plan? Fabric Plan inherits row-level security from your existing Power BI semantic model, and adds an additional layer of application-level permissions for scenarios, approvals, and specific measures.

How Collectiv Helps Organizations Implement Fabric Plan

Everything Fabric Plan makes possible depends on one thing: a Power BI semantic model that’s actually built right. Fabric Plan doesn’t fix a weak data foundation. It exposes it faster.

That means the work involved in getting Fabric Plan right looks different depending on where an organization is starting from, and Collectiv works across the full range of that work:

Strategy and assessment, for teams that need to know whether their current Power BI environment and semantic model are ready for Fabric Plan before they build anything
Implementation, for teams ready to build Planning Sheets, Power Table, and Intelligence Sheets directly, including the semantic model work that has to happen underneath them
Architecture, for organizations still building out their medallion architecture in Fabric and want planning designed in from the start rather than bolted on later
Training, for internal teams who will own Fabric Plan day to day and need to build it, maintain it, and troubleshoot it themselves
Managed services and strategic support, for organizations that want an embedded team keeping Fabric Plan (and the broader Fabric environment it runs on) running well long after go-live