The modern world is full of data, but not necessarily data which offers any meaning. The number of likes on a social media post about having beans on toast for tea will never set the world on fire, even though it’s all good fun.
Companies need insight to all aspects of their business regularly. Gone are the days of “all you need are a dozen KPIs and you’re done”.
Let’s take a look at how a business with poor, or older reporting systems might operate. It could be operating legacy systems with reports which:
- May take too long to run
- Have to be run by IT or accounting staff
- Don’t get delivered on time
- Come from out-of-the-box software and are not relevant to the actual business
- Require further analysis after review, taking up valuable IT or accounting resource
- Are dull in their presentation; no colour, no graphics, not well sorted
With Power BI the information is at your fingertips:
- No reports to run – the reports update automatically at a frequency to suit the business
- One version of the truth for the entire organisation
- Good visuals draw the eye to the issues and insights
- Easily drill down to the detail of a problem to see the root cause. (Is it one transaction, a particular product, customer, manager or sales executive?).
- Track issues over time
- Reduce the number of spreadsheets in the organisation
- Share with MS Teams
- Filter and slice easily reducing the need to run multiple reports
In this time-starved world where we now find ourselves, it is important that business management has the right tools to do the job. Business analysis software has been around for 20 years but was out of the price range for most organisations, was difficult to tailor to specific business needs without IT specialists and was out of date almost as soon as it was written.
Power BI is a cost-effective tool for managing not just accounting, but any aspect of control process and profitability. It will get management to the root cause of an issue quickly leaving time to solve the problem rather than just decide what the problem is.