Issue: Semantic model refresh completes with warnings due to sort-by-column behavior in Statement file

[dkillilea]

We’ve implemented our financial statements in Power BI using Bob’s framework from this repo and the accompanying video. It’s a genuinely excellent solution and has worked reliably for us for several years.

Starting on March 10, 2026, our semantic model refresh in the Power BI service began returning the message “Refresh completed with warnings.” The refresh still succeeds, but this is new behavior and has raised concerns about long‑term stability.

Suspected root cause
We believe the issue is related to the Statement file and the use of Sort By Column, which is critical for maintaining correct statement ordering in the presentation layer.

For example:

• ReportSection is sorted by ReportNo
• Multiple columns rely on explicit sort relationships to render financial statements correctly

This works cleanly when there is a single statement. As we added additional statements that reuse the same ReportSection values, Power BI continued to work because the sort relationship had already been established. In effect, this “tricked” Power BI into allowing the configuration, even though multiple values now share the same sort key across statements.

Our suspicion is that:

• A newer version of Power BI Desktop and/or the Power BI Service is now detecting these duplicate sort-by scenarios
• The service still allows the refresh to complete, but flags it with warnings

Concern
Our primary concern is stability and forward compatibility:

• Proper sort order in the presentation layer is non‑negotiable for financial statements
• We’re concerned that a future service update may move from warning to refresh failure

What we’re trying to do
We’re actively exploring alternative approaches to achieve deterministic sort order for statements without relying on sort‑by-column patterns that may no longer be fully supported or tolerated by the service.

We wanted to raise this both to:

• Share what we’re seeing in case others are encountering similar behavior
• Get guidance or recommendations on more durable sorting patterns for this framework going forward

[bobduffyie]

Yes. Its a big limitation in that each Report Heading must ideally have a single sort order.

In newer versions we get around this in 2 ways:

1. Modify the code to use the 1st sort order for all instances of the report heading. Eg Revenue is sort order 1, regardless of report used in. This doesnt work if different reports need different sort orders for same heading, but it makes sure no error on refresh and consistent PBI model.
2. Rename the Report heading when used on a different report in a different sort position. White space, different name, full stop. etc.
   This works well, but does mean that when you add report heading to a slicer you get duplicates.

A 3rd way is a different statement table per major report but no one wants that!

Sadly Power Bi does not support hierarchy aware sort orders. A few blogs on this. but they all assume that different hierarchies have different child values, which is not the case on Financial reporting.