Business Intelligence (BI) simply means using technologies, applications and practices to analyze business information. The purpose of BI is to foster better decision making.
Does all the jargon make your head spin? Don’t let it. Applying technologies that make sense for your business is a smart business decision.
As a business consultant in my former life, I saw many companies that didn’t know what they didn’t know. That is, you must have accurate and timely information to make good decisions. Otherwise, you are guessing. Often, things can “feel” right but turn out to be disasters. Don’t get me wrong. Your “gut feel” counts for a lot when running a business, but you must have much more than a “flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants” plan to capitalize on opportunities and avoid making big mistakes.
So how do you use this BI without breaking the bank? Just as important, how do you find a tool or small business dashboard that isn’t overly complicated or functionally impossible to use – and that has the practical, operational solutions you want and need? Most small businesses do not have the IT staff or the business expertise in house to create or implement tools internally, and the costs of many third-party solutions are ridiculously high.
Let’s quickly explore the small-and-medium business (SMB) paradigm from the owner’s or manager’s perspective:
You want instant visibility of critical information presented in a format you can very quickly understand.
You do not want to learn a programming language.
You do not want to spend a small fortune on some custom solution.
Your time is typically in very short supply and you are pulled many directions. As the day goes on, this condition only gets worse.
You generally don’t like using financial accounting and reporting systems.
You may have a bookkeeper, but most of the financial reports that you generate or receive don’t mean much. What do you really do with those reports? How can you actually improve your business by looking at a monthly P & L or balance sheet printout?
You probably identify with most or all of the above SMB paradigm.
In a perfect world, you want to come to the office in the morning, click a few times and browse though the current state of the company. You of course want to identify critical items that need immediate attention, but you would also like to quickly see if what you are expecting to happen financially and operationally with your company is in fact happening.
You want to avoid looking at a pile of numbers that cause your eyes to glaze over. What if you could see a picture of exactly what is going on with your company instead? And what if this was actually an enjoyable experience over morning coffee? If something looks out of sync, what if you could simply click on the anomaly and immediately see the underlying data and the reason for the blip?
What if you could easily share this technology (with as much or as little of the underlying information as desired) with your staff, so that your team is unified, informed, and motivated?
And finally, what if such a solution was inexpensive and easy to use?
We’ve created just such a solution here at Qvinci Software, let me tell you how.
Many SMBs run QuickBooks® from Intuit for their accounting system. So we built a business intelligence dashboard called Qvinci® that takes QuickBooks® reports and turns them into charts, graphs and tables. These charts, graphs and tables give the user a visual representation of the actual numbers – a major step forward.
But we took it a step beyond. Frequency and trending of data graphically are hugely-valuable tools to the business manager. You can see relationships between different elements and do head-to-head comparisons between months, quarters, or years. This is incredibly useful for trending.
Imagine doing these kinds of things for all the important data from fuel costs to electricity to cost of goods to project costs. Once you create these charts, they will be there every time you open a Qvinci small business dashboard and the data will automatically freshen as your company moves through the month or year.
You obviously want to see what has happened with your company to date. Equally or more important is knowing whether you are going to stay on or under your expenses budget and hit or exceed your revenue targets, based on where you are today. Qvinci™ makes it easy by incorporating a tool called “triggers”.
Triggers are displayed as a table of financial data that you select. They provide an early warning if your numbers to date indicate that a revenue target will be missed or an expense threshold will be exceeded.
You simply select an item to track from the P&L, balance sheet or other report, then set a target (a desired amount to achieve) or a threshold (an amount not to cross over). The Qvinci executive dashboard pulls the actual data from QuickBooks® and linearly estimates the projected value for the month or year. If the projection indicates that the target or threshold will not be met, the item turns red. So if you pick 10 important items and set the triggers based on historical metrics, Qvinci™ draws your attention – via color coding on the main screen – to those items needing action.
Using Qvinci™, you might have 15 to 20 QuickBooks dashboard pages of your company’s most important operational data, all up-to-the-minute-current, and you can navigate through the visuals in about 10 minutes with a high degree of understanding. The items needing attention on any given day can be drilled down and isolated for further action by the manager or staff member.
Knowing your company’s actual data points and projected trends are the keys to making the best management decisions. You’ve seen how Qvinci QuickBooks Dashboard lets you see your data, rather than read it, and how it keeps you ahead of the curve by trending and trigger tools. But we again went a step beyond. In our Qvinci Pro version, we added a powerful Proforma tool.
Proformas give you detailed projections based on what your company has actually been doing. You have been performing in a certain manner, so the Proforma simply scales that forward. You can then go through the Proforma, make your “what-if’ adjustments, and manage accordingly to hit the levels indicated by your adjustments. Using this tool, the manager is able to provide staff with measurable goals and objectives. If you hold to the levels projected, you will attain the expected results. And since Qvinci™ makes the data visible and easily digestible, you can fine tune and correct your course on a daily or weekly basis.
The goal of business intelligence dashboards and management tools should be to provide the manager with measurable data points and a road map to success, in an easy-to-use, pleasing interface.
A typical morning might look like this: grab a cup of coffee, check your email, and then click through your business management dashboard. From here, with all vital information about your company available to you, making the right decisions to manage your business is easy.
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