When the manager wants to know how their division is performing or the CEO wants to know the overall health of the business what needs to be done?

Do you have to pull up a revenue report from an accounting system, a sales report from a CRM system, a productivity report from a performance tracking system? Perhaps you have a different set of reports to run, but a common complaint I hear from customers is that it is so difficult to know how a business is performing when you have to pull bits and pieces from multiple systems. More often with this type of reporting responses to business problems are reactionary versus proactive.

With Power BI you can connect to databases, such as SQL and Azure, files, such as Excel or CSV/Text, online services, such as Dynamics CRM, Salesforce and Sharepoint along with many more. Pull in data from multiple sources and view data points on a single dashboard or report.

Enabling customers to quickly view and analyze their data allows them to spend more time running their business versus running reports. No more piecing information together from multiple systems, no more combining and manipulating data in excel, no more long hours pulling together weekly, monthly or quarterly results for an operational meeting. With Power BI you set up connections, build the reports and then share with colleagues. At that point any of those working with the data can pull up the report and see how the business is performing.

Here is an example of a sales report pulling from a CRM and an accounting system to show current versus previous sales progress.

Here is an example of a HR report pulling from an employee database and an excel file showing current employee attrition.

These are two basic examples of pulling together more than one set of data, but there are so many more options. For a complete list of data sources you can connect to select “Get data” from the toolbar within Power BI desktop.

Even though there are many others benefits to using CRM this will always be the first thing I mention to customers because it is such an important benefit. Almost all the companies I have worked with have at least two systems they work with and can benefit from pulling the data into a single dashboard. If you are faced with this same issue it’s time to take a look at Power BI. Contact us to learn more.

-Jerica Coleman, CRM and Power BI Consultant