AI planning in Power BI

Aimplan

His second planning company lives inside Power BI

In 2019, Erik Lidman helped sell Bizview, a Skellefteå budgeting company he co-owned, to an American buyer. Three years later he co-founded Aimplan to put planning inside the Power BI reports finance teams already use.

Spotlight Images: Aimplan

100+organizations in 17 countries use AimplanCompany-reported, as of Oct 2026 · Source for 100+ organizations in 17 countries use Aimplan
50%shorter budgeting lead time at Polarbröd, from its autumn 2024 budgetCompany-reported, as of Oct 2026 · Source for 50% shorter budgeting lead time at Polarbröd, from its autumn 2024 budget
Up to 4 hoursa month that production managers at Norra Skog report savingCustomer-reported, as of Oct 2026 · Source for Up to 4 hours a month that production managers at Norra Skog report saving

Founders: Erik Lidman; Emil Eklund
HQ: Skellefteå, Sweden
Sector: FP&A, corporate performance management
Website: Visit Aimplan

Born Capital is an investor in Aimplan.

The story

A sale up north

In September 2019, Skellefteå's daily paper Norran reported that Bizview Systems had an American owner. The budgeting software firm had started in the town in 2001. It employed 30 people, ten of them locally, and had booked SEK 43 million in revenue the year before. The buyer, insightsoftware, wanted a way into Scandinavia. Erik Lidman had run Bizview's product and engineering since 2013 and was one of its owners. He told the paper the sale was proof that a world-class system could come out of Skellefteå. He then led the Swedish and Norwegian business through the integration and left the group in 2021.

Starting over

Lidman's career in corporate performance management began in 1996 at Prodacapo and ran through years of consulting for clients in Sweden, Norway and the UK. Bizview had shipped its own web interface, styled after Excel. For his next company he went the other way. In 2022 he and engineer Emil Eklund started Aimplan in Skellefteå to build planning into Microsoft Power BI, a tool finance and business teams knew already, rather than hand them one more standalone platform. Arctic Business took the startup into its incubator.

Jagged mountain ridges fading into haze, from Aimplan's website

Budgets beside actuals

Aimplan adds input visuals to Power BI. A manager types a budget or forecast straight into a report, the figures land in a central database, and the plan sits next to actuals in the same dashboards. At Polarbröd, the family-owned bakery that is Sweden's third-largest bread maker, each cost center once kept its own spreadsheet while finance chased versions. With partner Dizparc, the bakery ran its autumn 2024 budget in Aimplan, and Aimplan reports that the budgeting lead time was halved. Its controller, Roger Öberg, said budgeting had never felt this quick in his long career. At forest group Södra, where Microsoft recommended Aimplan, partner XLENT started in April 2024 on a budget process for 300 users that was due to go live in August, and the 2025 budget was finished on time.

Where AI works

AI enters in two main places. In the planning visual, forecasts from models trained with Microsoft Fabric's AutoML show up as suggestions. A department head or sales lead weighs each one, sets a target and signs off on the number. On September 28, 2026, Aimplan opened public previews of an AI Assistant and an MCP server. The assistant reads how a customer's Power BI model is built, never the figures inside it. It asks what the plan should cover, proposes a design, and creates tables, measures and scenarios only after a person approves. Through the MCP server, Claude, ChatGPT or Copilot can do the same work. Each customer's administrator decides when to switch the assistant on.

From Skellefteå outward

Aimplan had more than 40 partners worldwide by January 2025. In 2026 it says over 100 organizations in 17 countries use it, Jägermeister, Permobil and Hultafors among them. At Fellowmind Denmark, 30 managers forecast revenue each quarter for about 430 billable consultants. At Norra Skog, a forest owners' association in northern Sweden, production managers report saving up to four hours a month. In November 2025 the team, grown from two people to eight, moved into a bigger office on Skeppargatan in Skellefteå. Days later, Norran reported that Aimplan was starting a subsidiary on the US East Coast.

Visit aimplan.com

AI at Aimplan

Aimplan's AI works inside the Power BI reports managers already use. It suggests forecasts and, in a public preview, drafts planning models; a person approves every number and every change.

Forecasts from Microsoft Fabric's AutoML appear as suggestions for managers to review
Plain-language questions, through Power BI Copilot, over the comments managers add to their plans
An AI assistant designs and builds planning solutions once a person approves (public preview)

The founders

Erik Lidman
Founder and CEO
Studied finance and business administration at Umeå and has more than 25 years in FP&A and corporate performance management. Started PowerBI Edge, a podcast on Power BI for finance teams, in December 2025, and posts daily for more than 55,000 followers on LinkedIn.
Emil Eklund
Co-founder, engineering lead
Builds Aimplan's product in Skellefteå, working across Power BI, DAX, SQL, TypeScript, React and Azure. Created markdown-visual, an open-source Markdown visual for Power BI that is listed on Microsoft AppSource.

Milestones

2019Sep
insightsoftware buys Bizview Systems, the Skellefteå budgeting firm where Lidman ran development.
2022
Erik Lidman and Emil Eklund start Aimplan in Skellefteå; Arctic Business incubates it.
2024Nov
Connects to Microsoft Fabric's new SQL databases in public preview, the week Microsoft launched them at Ignite.
2025Jan
Graduates from the Arctic Business incubator with nearly 100 customers.
2025Nov
Team of eight moves to a larger Skellefteå office and says it is starting a US subsidiary.
2026Sep
AI Assistant and MCP server for building planning models enter public preview.