What is business intelligence (BI)?
In short
Business intelligence (BI) is collecting, combining and analysing business data to turn it into reports and dashboards. Data from, for example, the accounts, the CRM and the webshop comes together, so you can see figures from different systems side by side.
How does business intelligence work?
A BI solution goes through three steps:
- Collecting: retrieving data from the systems you already use, such as accounting, CRM, ERP, webshop or Excel, usually via their API.
- Combining: cleaning the data and linking it, so that, for example, a customer in the CRM is the same as in the accounts. With larger volumes the data first comes together in a data warehouse.
- Presenting: reports and dashboards with the figures that matter, such as revenue per customer group, margin per product or outstanding receivables, that update themselves.
When do you need BI?
The reports in your packages are enough as long as your questions stay within one system. BI pays off when you want to combine figures from several systems, when the monthly report takes days of copying and pasting in Excel, or when different departments report different figures for the same concept.
What should you look out for?
Most of the work is not in the charts but in the integrations and in agreeing definitions: what counts as revenue, when is a customer active? Record those before you build dashboards. When choosing a tool, look at the standard connectors to your systems, the cost per user who views reports, and who maintains the model if the person who built it leaves.
Which software helps with this?
BI software ranges from reporting tools within a package to platforms such as Power BI. The connections to your source systems usually matter more than the charts.
Compare in the category
Including Microsoft Power BI, Looker Studio and Qlik Cloud Analytics.