Power BI has been growing in popularity over the past few years, but some out there might still be wondering why they should use this tool. Reporting within any organization is important as it can give look at the overall health and performance of your business, spot trends and potential problems and be used for forecasting future opportunities.
Features of Power BI
Power BI has too many features to talk about in one article, but here are the basics you need to know.
With Power BI you can connect to multiple sources and pull them together in a single report. This eliminates the need to piece together reports from multiple systems.
Available visuals, analytics and formatting capabilities allow reports to be extremely customized and provide ways to interact with the data allowing end-users the ability to dig into the results and look at it in multiple ways.
Using Power BI Pro data can be kept up to date with automatic refreshes. No more waiting for a month end report, you can see where you are at daily or even multiple times a day as long as data is being entered into the respective systems.
Now that we’ve reviewed a few key features let’s look at 4 benefits to using Power BI.
Saves Time
Gone are the days when an administrative assistant will need to manually run a report or gather the data and put it together in a single report for their respective teams. With Power BI once the connections are established getting the data can be as easy as logging into a Power BI Pro account to view current stats or, if not using automatic refreshes, it can be a simple click of the refresh button to pull in current numbers.
With the ability to drill down into data managers will no longer have to ask for more information in understanding what is feeding the numbers they can simply drill into a particular data point and get down to the individual transactions behind those numbers, helping them pinpoint issues.
Customizable Experience
Everyone has a certain way they like to see things and with Power BI you can avoid the hassle of creating multiple versions of the same report or trying to get everyone on board with one person’s viewpoint on how the data should be presented.
End-users can establish dashboards and favorites to easily navigate to the visuals they are interested in or be granted the capability to make their own reports from a dataset.
Security levels can be set so one report is created and end-users can be granted permissions to only see data applicable to them.
Higher End-User Buy-In
This is the hope of every report creator that their hard work and time will not be in vain by having a bunch of reports that no one really looks at or uses. With Power BI the ease of navigation, interactivity of reports and the ability to keep reports up to date have dramatically increased end-user buy-in when it comes to reporting.
Power BI Pro also carries the ability to see how many views and who is viewing your reports so you can quickly identify who may not be utilizing the reports and coach them appropriately.
Become Proactive vs. Reactive
Once you have end-user buy-in good reporting starts to pay off as you can make the switch from reacting and putting out fires to proactively changing course as you identify both positive and negative trends. If you are reviewing up to date data you can see a project starting to perform badly and take appropriate action in the middle versus waiting until the end of the project and just trying to do better the next time.
If you are interested in checking out these or some of the other awesome benefits of Power BI check out our library of webinars, other blog posts or reach out to schedule a demo of Power BI.
-Jerica Coleman, CRM and Power BI Consultant
