The Best Kept Secret in Business Intelligence!​

How can you have all your finance insights under your fingertip?

There is a simple solution out there that can help you to utilise your company’s finance data much easier. You may even have it already if you use Microsoft for business. 

Not interested in finance data? Not a problem, the solution can be used for any data. So, keep on reading.

What is the issue businesses are facing?

The amount of data businesses are facing increases exponentially. Arguably, finance data is the most important as it provides information on businesses’ health. 

However, it is hard to see trends and potential issues in spreadsheets. As you may have noticed, data and insights do not exactly pop-up easily in Excel. Plus, it is hard to link and compare multiple datasets. You have to do everything manually using clunky functions and things get quite messy very quickly. 

Power Bi Financial Dashboard Is A Solution

The solution is Power BI. It is a business analytics service by Microsoft. It aims to provide interactive visualisations and business intelligence capabilities with an interface simple enough for end-users to create their reports and dashboards. You can link datasets with no code and start overlaying data to get those insights you seek.

You can create your customised dashboard views with buttons and graphs, which allow you to track your data easily at various levels. With good Power BI expert in just 3 days, you can start to explore relationships and trends that you could never see in a plain spreadsheet before. 

Power BI has great functionality to automate data feeds and refresh reports. It also has online access capabilities to share your visuals.

Dashboard Example

You can see a basic Power BI example below. The example should help you to get some ideas on how to use the tool in your business. Note, Power BI can do much more.

Price?

You could have an enterprise-level dashboard for the fraction of the cost of some other business intelligence tools. Power BI costs only £7.50 ($9.99) a month per user and a single-user version is free with any business email. Though, you cannot share a dashboard with others in an organisation with the free version. As I have mentioned before, you may already have it! Check most up to date information on Power BI pricing here

Why should you care?

Having this capability at the tip of your finger could bring you insights on most promising products or regions. You will see where to concentrate your efforts and resources.

Also, the personal (or business) dashboard can highlight to you areas that need improvement. Thus, allowing you to make informed decisions based on data and insights it provides. 

You can use Power BI to automate your reports with limited intervention: 

• If your business is downsizing and you no longer can have a full-time data analyst, 
• or you are expanding but would like to limit expansion costs.

How to create it and maintain it?

Learn Yourself:

You can learn Power BI. It is as easy as to learn Excel. It will take you 2-3 weeks of good work to learn how to build dashboards.

Get someone to do it for you:

Or, you can get someone else to do the first version and teach you how to use and maintain it. Normally, a medium-sized dashboard takes a week to complete.

Either way, you will have your insights up and running in no time. The dashboard can be set up to give you complete oversight of your business. Thus, you can drive your business regardless of the situation.

Where can you use your dashboard?

You can use it on tablets and smartphones and in many other Microsoft apps like MS Teams. You can bring it to business meetings and show data in near-real-time. 

The best thing, you do not need an analyst to do reports for you, choose slicer you want and insights are there for you to share.

Conclusion

Power BI is a great solution that competes with the best business intelligence tools in the market. But you do not have to spend a fortune. The solution that helps you to run your business and potentially save you time and money is very affordable and easy to set up. 

As you can concentrate on decision making and prioritisation of profitable or problematic issues, you will create much more value than the cost you incur. 

I have used it myself multiple time in projects to support message-driven by data and provide insights to senior stakeholders. It a super handy skill to have as a project manager and data analyst.

Additional Support

If you like to learn more about how Power BI can help in your specific case, drop me a line. We can discuss the business case, applicability and set up. After our discussion, if you think that Power BI could help your business, I can build a dashboard for you. I could also teach you to maintain everything yourself with absolutely no code. Let’s make your life easy!